

Hotmail Blocking Email - missenlinx

I run a legitiment website &#38; I do require that users activate their accounts via email. Now i've tried sending email to my hotmail and it doesn't go into SPAM nor the INBOX.<p>I have done some research and lots are stating that hotmail are dropping emails. (I read once this is illegal)<p>My server is in no blacklists and isn't used for spam purposes.<p>Any suggestions would be great.
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gexla
Common problem with Hotmail and a bit of a crapshoot. I assume you have done
all the general SPF stuff. There is a postmaster website for Hotmail
(guidelines, contact info and other tools) and also a whitelist that you can
get on if you are ready to pay out the nose. Google around for it.

One thing you can do is to get an account with an external SMTP service (such
as Authsmtp) and configure your email server (such as Postfix) to relay your
email through that service. Many people use Gmail for this but Gmail requires
unique settings that can make this kind of a pain. This allows you to
piggyback on the deliverability of the other service.

If you are sending out newsletters, you might consider going with a
specialized service such as Constant Contact.

If you look around, there are more blog posts and information sites that are
more detailed. One of them is on hacker news as I type this. Good luck.

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bayareaguy
Just curious, where did you read that dropping email is illegal?

It may be against the terms of service or perhaps violate a service contract
but for it to be illegal there would probably need to be evidence of some
other nefarious activity.

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icey
It is not illegal to drop emails.

That being said, are you positive the problem is with hotmail itself and not
its mail handlers?

For example, if you use the incorrect sort of line breaks [1] in an email that
gets sent to a qmail server, the server will silently drop that email message.
It will report an error textually but not return an actual error code. This
could make it look like your email was getting dropped. This happens quite
frequently with machine generated emails.

Who knows if MSN / Hotmail uses qmail, but my point is that there may be other
matters afoot than Hotmail intentionally playing hardball with you.

[1] Qmail pukes when you send an email that contains carriage returns without
line feeds.

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JamesBrooks
We've had this problem a lot, even with specific in house policies for how
mail should be sent from our web applications. I've found that making sure the
SPF record is correct and very 'tight' helps a lot. Also make sure before
you're mail server isn't running as an open relay well before you send a test
e-mail to Hotmail (make sure everything is perfect before you send to
hotmail).

After that, don't just start sending a large bulk of e-mail to hotmail, send a
few (they'll run some tests, open port, check SPF, etc!!). After a bit then
start shipping mail out to hotmail.

Even after all of this you can still be up the creak, we've gone to using
AuthSMTP at work now (having Postfix directly proxy the requests on). It's
fast and we can deliver to hotmail (a lot less stuffing around).

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dzohrob
Start here: <http://postmaster.msn.com>.

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es
We had exactly the same problem and have tried a lot of things. But recently
we have solved it. You need to set SPF and register it with hotmail. It should
solve your issue.

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hhm
I had more simple problems with Hotmail. I had many cases where people sent me
mails to Yahoo and Gmail accounts and if they came from Hotmail mail
addresses, they just didn't reach me at all. Some Hotmail users I knew had
difficulties even to subscribe to Google and Yahoo Groups too (for the same
reason). Mail sent FROM Hotmail accounts many times doesn't even go to spam
folders.

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tx
We had the exact same issue with these morons. Email them and explain what's
up. They will add you to their "white list". Funny thing is how their SMTP
server accepts messages without errors and then just silently drops them.

It's Microsoft we're dealing with here.

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missenlinx
Hmm Thanks for your suggestions. I might actually just get hotmail users for
now to just go via an alternate activation method.

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yekmer
I had the same problem, have you got correct reverse DNS record? it may help.

