Off Topic: Hotmail

[Anthony Cartmell]

> If I send a message out from hotmail.com and reply... the reply will  
> have a much much higher success rate at getting back to hotmail.com than  
> a brand new message.  (Especially from Outlook).

Probably because people tend to notice if their reply doesn't arrive, as  
both parties are aware of the "conversation" and are expecting messages...

I suspect that the problem of e-mails going missing on the first contact  
attempt isn't such an issue for Hotmail to fix simply because so few  
people notice that this happens :(

> Even though I totally disagree with paying to be on a hotmail  
> whitelist... it is something I might have to do... because it is my  
> servers users who count... not my opinions.

All of their help and support is aimed squarely at people sending many  
e-mails from a mailing list. I suspect their whitelist is similarly  
aimed.  They certainly don't seem to see that there's a problem with  
occasional individual messages disappearing.

> I am going to try and sort out this SPF DNS method... the main problem  
> is that alot of peoples domain registrations are all over the place...  
> so it is going to take some work.

SPF is probably a useful thing to set up anyway, as Google and others use  
it. Sadly Hotmail, and their nasty filter, uses a Microsoft copy of SPF  
called SenderID, which does things differently. Although it uses SPF  
records from DNS, it applies them differently and so sometimes comes up  
with "wrong" results, compared with SPF tests.

Anthony
-- 
www.fonant.com - Quality web sites