Open letter to Microsoft

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.