October 2007 Archives

Dear ESPN,

I don't like the feel good stories. I like seeing replays.

Love,
Ricky (Marc)

You may remember my rant from last week regarding hotmail. I've had numerous back and forth emails with their technical service, and the issue even got escalated to the "Windows Live Email Delivery and Filter Support Team."

Has there been any change or improvement? Not yet.
Am I sick of email not getting to my friends on hotmail? You bet.

In the mean time I have implemented a work around (read: hack) for email addresses in the hotmail.com domain. If I have broken anything, please let me know, but I have tested it a few different ways.

Technical details are after the jump, if you are interested.

This is definitely some good advice on how not to be not funny (is that enough of a double negative for you?)...

(Wow, two posts in one day?!?)

I just noticed something that Thunderbird does (or doesn't do, depending on your perspective) in version 2.0.0.5 that has bugged me about most every email client (MUA) out there.

When you reply to something out of your sent items, it actually realizes that you are in your sent items and populates the original recipient in the To field instead of putting the sender (i.e. you) in the To field.

Thank you for fixing this, now if everyone else would follow suit....

Dear Microsoft,

You stink.

Your Hotmail service that many of my friends rely on doesn't accept my email anymore. What gives? We used to be ok, but now you classify me as spam? What's spammy about this?

hey, wanna go flying tomorrow? we can go early morning, or after the game.

let me know.

/me

I deal with email and spam every day. I understand that you may have false positives, and that's ok.

Let's see if it ended up in the junk folder... Nope, not in there.

Oh look you have a "safe senders" list, maybe if we add my email address to that. Nope, you don't even consult that before you throw me out.

It appears that there is a (not very well documented) site to help out server administrators. I sent an email and got back the following:

We have identified that messages from your IP 10.3.2.1 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. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless.

However, we also base our spam rating on the reputation of the sender.

Ironically, thunderbird thinks that YOUR email is a SCAM because you display one URL [http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx] and link it to another [http://advertising.msn.com/adproducts/Email_TechStd.asp]. The link doesn't even exist. Way to go.

So, Microsoft. What do I do? Do you want me to give my server a new IP? Will that solve the problem? (This is why filtering based upon IP is silly). Yours is the only RBL that I am on. I am also not going to pay for SenderScore, as suggested in your email.

I apologize to those of you using Hotmail and aren't receiving email from me. If you haven't switched to Live yet, I would suggest not doing it--that's the only place it seems to happen for now.