Hey, I just found about new Microsoft efforts changes which might cause many emails to not be delivered to their email subscribers.
I'd like to hear from them, but have no clue who to contact.
The following is from the South by Southwest conference site
Most importantly, I don't think they ever clearly and conspicuously tell their users that according to them:
Microsoft does not have an obligation to deliver any particular e-mail message.
Here's more, but check out the whole entry for yourself at the link above.
"Recently, I found myself on the wrong side of Microsoft's white lists. My company is a small web-based service where users must supply a valid email address in order to register. We don't abuse the email addresses and state so in the Privacy Policy. As a result, we get many registrations and we need to send an auto-confirmation to the provided email address. If the user receives the email and clicks on the embedded URL, then the registration is completed. Pretty straight-forward stuff. As you would expect, many users provide Hotmail addresses. This is fine with us. We do the same when we visit other sites! About 5 weeks ago, new users started complaining to us about not receiving the confirmations. After seeing a pattern in the complaints and digging in the logs for a few weeks, we decided to bring our ISP into the loop. This helped our ISP see a pattern emerge out of the complaints from their other customers.Apparently, Microsoft had started dropping email into the bit bucket without letting anyone know. The hard part was proving this *and* finding a way to communicate our argument to Microsoft. How in the world do you get a hold of someone at Hotmail? There's no email addresses or phone numbers! We gathered our data and through personal connections, we were able to find a human being and work our way through the system. We finally found a Hotmail person who was willing to listen to us. At first she denied that Microsoft would dump email without explanation. After going through a few rounds of tests with her, she changed her story. She said:
Thank you for contacting MSN Hotmail. With the help of the detailed troubleshooting information you have provided, we have determined that the message in question, the Less Network Confirmation, but not your other test emails, has been blocked by an MSN Hotmail filter deployed to stop unsolicited e-mail. Like many other e-mail service providers, MSN Hotmail uses filtering methods to stop unsolicited e-mail. Consumers have told us that stopping unsolicited e-mail is a top priority and because our #1 goal is pleasing our customers, we are employing technology that helps protect them from unsolicited e-mail
Note that they're doing this without the informed consent or notice to their users.
If this is wrong, I'll correct it right away
Posted by craig at February 26, 2004 03:50 PMOn contacting Hotmail: Firstly, I'm pretty sure that some of the "standard" Hotmail e-mail addresses do work. (As do some of the standard Microsoft addresses, although I'm pretty sure both will get routed to third-tier helpdesks, like at most companies.)
Secondly, the main Hotmail page - as in www.hotmail.com - has a tab on it labeled "All About Hotmail", which seemed like an obvious enough choice when I wasn't able to find a "Contact Us" link right away. This page is covered in contact info for various problems, admittedly not including "My company's mail isn't getting through to Hotmail customers", but geared a little more to the average Hotmail customer, which seems understandable. I didn't see a phone number, but who the heck uses a telephone to communicate with a major e-mail company? If these folks wanted to be darn sure that Hotmail wouldn't drop the mail asking why Hotmail was dropping mail, then why not send it to a Microsoft address?
And did it occur to any of these supposedly tech-literate people to do a whois on Hotmail and get contact info that way?
So I don't see why these folks had to "use personal contacts" to get hold of what I strongly suspect equated to "abuse@hotmail". Especially since what I suspect (having worked a lot of customer service) is that these folks felt they were too important for "user-level" techsupport that they'd get from the obvious contact sources, and instead tried to find "a real person" to fix their problem.
I also am inclined to take issue with his use of "spoke" to someone at Hotmail, since what is included here looks a lot more like verbatim standard support e-mail responses. (Who talks like that on the phone?) From the sound of it, he never "spoke" to anyone, but got email support and didn't get advanced up the tier enough to communicate with anyone who could give him more than a canned response.
As for the legalese stating that Hotmail is not actually obliged to deliver your message: that's probably standard in most major e-mail providers, and telco, and probably dates back to telegrams. It's a standard 'out' to keep them from being sued. And really, how can any e-mail company promise to always deliver your mail? Do you know how hard it is to "prove" that a user (or even a company) didn't get its mail? I don't think it's possible, certainly almost never in a court of law.
I'll admit I'm not sure about Bonded Sender as a technology, but I'm nt going to blame Hotmail (which has to be one of the world's largest receivers of spam) for trying it. Yahoo has done some equally stupid stuff; this article is a great example. Nor am I convinced that whitelisting is a good solution in any form. Personally, I have high hopes for SPF, and frequently nag my mail admin with requests for new or modified SpamAssassin filters in the meantime.
Hotmail's certainly not perfect; I get spam there sometimes. I get spam at Yahoo, too. I'm not sure I've been able to keep any of my addresses spam-free, even on my own server, just filtered as heck.
But my years of techsupport smell a lot more "cranky customer" from Mr. McKinnon's complaints than I do a legitimate tech problem, or even a legitimate problem with Hotmail's support. I'm reading that speech as "I think Microsoft's whitelist sucks because I didn't get ass-kissing-perfect support from Hotmail" rather than anything resembling a legitimate tech argument against Microsoft's whitelisting. I can get anti-Microsoft content-less rants on Slashdot comments or at 2600 meetings; I don't need them at conferences. (Except DefCon, of course.)
Posted by: fey stranger at March 3, 2004 10:39 PMHere is the internal banter around this issue. Seems like it has been thought about, but resolved as "won't fix."
From: J.D. Falk
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 3:10 PM
To: Deepak Goel; working group for anti-spam
Subject: RE: Hotmail snafu reported - Is this really true?
To help answer Deepak's original question, let's take a look at each of the assertions made in Craig's blog.
"I don't think they ever clearly and conspicuously tell their users that according to them: Microsoft does not have an obligation to deliver any particular e-mail message." That part is somewhat true; you have to actually read the ToU.
"Apparently, Microsoft had started dropping email into the bit bucket without letting anyone know." As both Bob and Eliot mention below, that happens all the time. We can get into a discussion of the rationale if that'd help, but it should be obvious to anyone working with e-mail at a large scale.
"How in the world do you get a hold of someone at Hotmail? There's no email addresses or phone numbers!" The standard support@hotmail.com or abuse@hotmail.com addresses would've gotten them escalated to the correct group eventually. There's also a web form. Being a free service, however, Hotmail doesn't offer phone support.
"Note that they're doing this without the informed consent or notice to their users." See #1 -- and furthermore, our users don't want to know the details, they just want to get less spam.
If you have any suggestions for improving the public perception of this effort, this DL seems like a fine place to start discussing 'em.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Eliot Gillum
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 1:00 PM
To: Bob Atkinson; Deepak Goel; working group for anti-spam
Subject: RE: Hotmail snafu reported - Is this really true?
Indeed. But it's worth than the scale problem of sending NDRs: before you hit that, you have the scale problem of all the people complaining that their mail is being deleted. That is, you could imagine notifying the owner of each unique IP or domain that mail is being deleted once a day, but the number of CS people and lawyers required would be huge.
Eliot
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Bob Atkinson
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 12:52
To: Deepak Goel; working group for anti-spam
Subject: RE: Hotmail snafu reported - Is this really true?
The world has long past the point where all mail submitted for delivery is either delivered or bounced. Literally billions of messages per day are literally thrown in the bit bucket with no response generated. This isn’t restricted just to Hotmail, but is true of all the majors.
This state of affairs is of course entirely regrettable, but the scale of the spam problem is such that bouncing all spam simply isn’t pragmatically feasible (indeed, or even desirable).
Bob
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Deepak Goel
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 10:52 AM
To: working group for anti-spam
Subject: Hotmail snafu reported - Is this really true?
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