I even went as far as signing up for Azure, in the hopes that if I sent from a Microsoft IP it might not get blocked. But I didn't make it very far, every step of the way was like watching paint dry while the interface loaded or did something. Once I finally got the thing set up in order to send mail, the API was so molasses slow that it couldn't handle our mail throughput. Meaning it would take about 30 seconds to send each transactional email because of how slow their API is. Well that's only 2880 emails per day, that is not a reasonable send rate at all.
I have even lost customers over this mess, it's really hard to explain to them that they can't receive our email because of their provider and not us. Especially when Microsoft has the audacity to return: 250 OK Email Queued (but then not deliver it anyway!)
If anyone has any solutions to this mess I am all ears!
Once enough of your customers do this to cross a certain threshold, you are identified as an undesirable sender and QED.
There's like a middle scale where you're not big enough that Microsoft will go out of their way to whitelist you, but you're big enough that your "send to junk" rate is just high in terms of absolute numbers.
It's certainly not a ratio, it must be based on absolute numbers because I've seen it too many times across too many companies, and the only ones that get away with it are extremely low volume.
Once you have 1,000,000 mails, even a 0.1% mark as spam rate is 1,000 emails. - and some people treat mark as spam as their delete button, certainly more than 0.1% of people. Don't ask me why.
EDIT: on inspection; it's worth noting the mechanism is even more insidious than "people mark you as spam". Microsoft also weighs delete-without-opening as a negative signal. So if you're sending transactional mail (receipts, shipping notifications, invoices) and your users get exactly what they wanted, feel satisfied, and bin it without opening. You've just taken a reputation hit for doing your job correctly. The senders most at risk aren't the ones sending rubbish.
EDIT2; theres a reply to me that I can’t reply to because its [dead]; though the point is valid so I vouched. To them I say: I agree. But you probably want your receipt, and thats the example I gave (for a reason).
Once when this happened to me a couple of years ago, it was the opposite.
My e-mails were put by default by Microsoft as spam into the junk folder, without the customer knowing anything about this.
After I succeeded to notify him about this, he searched there the e-mails and marked them as "not spam", and then he received my following e-mails.
So initially the customer did nothing and was not aware that some of the e-mails sent to him are classified as spam, and he had to do active efforts to override this default action by Microsoft.
There was absolutely nothing suspicious about the e-mail messages classified as spam in their content, their only fault was not coming from one of the few major e-mail providers.
My impression is, that the only reason one would want to have MS as a mail provider is, that they are entrenched in the e-mail provider reputation and delivery game. Other than that, it seems to be an all around bad service. Not even talking about the mail client itself.
It looks like all it takes is one person to mark your email as spam, even by accident. Note that these are mailing lists which they signed up for in MailChimp case OR transactional emails in the Mailgun case.
It's only hotmail/outlook that we constantly have this issue with, Google etc. are all fine.
Sounds like it's gotten even worse.
In which case, people like me with an @hotmail.com address from the 90’s were much earlier users of the outlook.com email boxes than when the domain was “launched” by Microsoft.
That’s typically not a disguise but a clear means of indicating that you can reply to the email
That is not how spam filters work.
Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers, so it must be common enough to warrant Gmail developer attention.
Unfortunately close to 100% of the spam I'm flagging causes this popup now :-/
I'm getting a dozen spam a day now on my Gmail account ... I think they're losing the battle.
Otherwise there’s no incentive for the big providers to care.
Similarly for anti-virus. It’s a PITA when Windows or Mac falsely flag a program as a virus when it’s not in their app stores.
Weird trick to get unblocked: follow the standard three-email procedure to sender support, then send a fourth email ccing buscond@microsoft.com telling them to unblock or next step is attorney general.
The thing about a lot of attorney generals is they LOVE to smack down a big corporation like Microsoft for the little guy.
These are emails that our customers have specifically requested and we get support tickets blaming us.
It's been like this for years.
The ISP there claims they haven't received any reports of SPAM. But that sounds wrong. No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.
So putting that together, it seems like a small ISP screwed up and let spammers go wild, and Outlook blocked them for it. I can't really fault Outlook for that.
The "rate limiting" started two weeks ago, giving us a code that Microsoft's documentation doesn't even list. It remains unresolved. Never had critical issues like this on our transactional IPs prior to this, and this particular IP address is still delivering just fine to other consumer and corporate email systems.
This has been affecting reputable senders who take spam reporting seriously, including MXRoute and Discourse.
> No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.
"No reports" can mean a lot of things. There is no "probably".
The "you" in "your" is Microsoft because under a certain volume of email, they don't even send reports. I regularly test the abuse contact address for my server because of this exact unfair assumption - that it must be my fault. I have never once gotten an abuse report notification from Microsoft, but I have gotten a bounce message saying that I'm blocked because I apparently send spam! Btw, this was in reply to an email from a Microsoft user.
Worse, I figured I'd just disallow any email from a Microsoft property - if an outlook (or hotmail or live or anyone else) sends an email, I can just bounce it and tell them to use a different service to reach me since I can't reply. Nope! Microsoft won't surface the bounce message to the user.
So, I am barred from replying to Microsoft emails. I am also barred from informing the sender that their email won't reach me.
It's defamation - the sender is always going to assume that it is my fault if I didn't reply even if the reason I "didn't reply" is outside of my control.
> So putting that together, it seems like a small ISP screwed up and let spammers go wild, and Outlook blocked them for it. I can't really fault Outlook for that.
Yes, in your imagined scenario, you can't really fault outlook. In the real world, however, outlook is very much to blame.
I blocked off Zendesk entirely because they didn't fix their shitty email system. The other newsletter mail services (mailgun/sendgrid/etc.) are just as bad for this.
There are plenty of reasons why large email senders could (and should) be on reputation blacklists. None of these email delivery companies seem to care very much about the spam they send until shit hits the fan, and now that it did it seems everyone blames the people maintaining the blacklists.
How many users would you see as the threshold then?
Since you stated that there is a spin to this, how many users would go over your defined threshold level?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5786144/...
which comes from an ESP serving millions of users.
Just like Internet Explorer used to be the program you used once -- and only once -- to download a proper browser.
All I could find was that his dad’s email was missing SPF/DMARC but the other email address that was having problems looked like it was configured correctly.
I only was able to get a screenshot of the email voice his dad received and it mentioned being on a block list (like in the article).
UPDATE: After a bit of digging it looks like they started the username recycling policy in 2013, may have quietly stopped doing that in 2018 but formalized no longer doing that in 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20230627104616/https://www.micro...
"Summary of changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement – June 15, 2021 [...] In the Outlook and Office Services sections, we’ve removed the Outlook.com section to clarify that an email address or username is not recycled into our system or assigned to another user."
Outlook.com certainly has to show up as an expense, one that Microsoft would like to reduce. When you look at what other providers charge for a single email account, it's hard to see Microsoft making money of Outlook.com. There's obviously something to be said for scale, but still, it must cost them something.
Can you actually use a non-outlook account for windows? Or are you talking about a different kind of "ms account"?
it also funnels people into using exchange for work. more like a "marketing expense".
I moved my email to Fastmail, and I’ve been very happy ever since. But now that I own the domain, moving to a different provider - if I ever need to - would be trivial.
Now I only use Windows for legacy software that my customers force on me.
Fedora has not just been liberating, but jaw dropping. I actually felt offended that I had wasted so much time on debian-family/ubuntu/mint and windows.
The concept, way back when, was great. I tried to use it, by a previous name, for replicating / distributing data backups and it always worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable went wrong, and I had to re-set it up essentially from scratch and it worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable went wrong.
In the intervening 15+ years, OneDrive has never made my experience of computing better. It has only ever nagged, slowed, and failed. And that was before Microslop went down the x% AI coding path.
Gmail was usually ok.
Yahoo had some max messages per day.
But Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever just made the messages disappear, no spam folder, no bounce, just disappear. We had some success telling the students to send us a message from their Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever address half an hour before registration. This adds our address to some special secret list for that account, and our later messages (usually) reach them. (It may fail. It may fail. IWOMM. YMMV.)
550 5.7.520 Message blocked because it contains content identified as spam. AS(4810)'
Something is rotten in the state of Outlook
Eh. Another product driven into ground by Microslop
I assume also their junk filters block some emails and there is no way to avoid it, you repeatedly add senders to safe senders list, even to safe subscriptions and their email still end up marked as junk even after years long communication from same addresses.
As backup when something important I write email to recipient from gmail whether they received my email from outlook only to find out my email was never received.
fuck big tech :)