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.
My mail server runs sendmail (GASP! He's telling people he runs sendmail???). I know there are "better" things out there, but I haven't found them to be "better." Besides, sendmail is like the blanket you've had for 20 years--it's comfortable.
Anyway...
You may remember that my server IP is on a blacklist for the people that have "upgraded" to live. Knowing that, I decided to investigate a way to make sendmail send email to specific domains via an email relay. If I wanted to send all mail via a relay, I could have used a smarthost, but I didn't want the extra step for everything, just hotmail.com addresses.
Then I remembered that sendmail has a nifty feature called mailertable that allows you to do just what I was looking for. In fact, one step in the documentation on the feature sums it up exactly:
...create an external database containing the routing information for various domains...
30 seconds later, and it "just works." Neat.
