Thus said Hans Fugal on Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:32:22 MDT: > It has come to my attention that MSN/Hotmail/Windows Dead is being > evil.
I can confirm that they have had these problems for quite some time. I first noticed these problems almost a year and a half ago. > This is truly evil behavior. Worse than SPF. Does anyone know if > there's any way to figure out what the problem is? It's possible > there's a slight misconfiguration or a workaround that would get us in > the good graces of msn, but I have no idea how to find it. Yes, I > read through http://postmaster.msn.com which aside from thoroughly > depressing me had no effect. As you have discovered they are being extremely draconian in their attempts to fight spam. Words cannot express how bad they are making things. At any rate, here is what I have learned in my research of this issue. A couple years ago they started implementing what they call ``SmartScreen'' technology. However, rather than reject emails that are bad, or otherwise allow the end user to make a determination as to whether or not it is spam, they just drop the email into /dev/null. This behavior is extremely bad and has the following effects. 1. It makes it look like the sender is doing something wrong (i.e. the email just disappears) and clearly since Hotmail is so big it must be the sender's fault. 2. It introduces unreliability in the extreme in the deliverability of emails. A bounce, would be much more preferable to silence. 3. There are likely others, but I only have so much energy... :-) In their responses to those who have been able to get ahold of them, they send a canned response which includes phrases like: ``We have identified that messages from your IP (x.x.x.x) are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen's filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn't spam.'' Clearly their SmartScreen isn't very smart after all. Here are some very good reads: http://parents.berkeley.edu/FAQ/hotmail.txt (This one in particular has a full discussion on what is happening including Hotmail's canned response). http://www.iis-aid.com/articles/iis_aid_news/are_hotmail_cutting_their_own_throat (the comments from this article are also very good reads, some even better than the article). http://www.e-consultancy.com/forum/102841-an-e-mail-deliverability-story-msn-hotmail-and-bonded-sender.html If you do a google search for "filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter" you will also find other good references. In short, they seem to be digging their own grave. I imagine webmasters will start suggesting that they don't support Hotmail email addresses unless they start to make SmartScreen smart. If you care to do so, there is a form you can fill out where you submit about 5 pages of information about your IP address, mail server software, audience, first born, etc... but in the end it won't likely get very far. The problem is mostly outside of your control. I have seen suggestions to add special headers to emails, but this is absurd. There is nothing in the RFCs that supports their arm twisting. You can have a 100% RFC compliant email with 100% innocuous content, and indeed 100% legitimate content, and it will still disappear. Good luck, Andy -- [-----------[system uptime]--------------------------------------------] 9:28pm up 2:42, 1 user, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00 /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
