alt Hacker NewsEmails to Outlook.com rejected due to a fault or overzealous blocking rules
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I'm thinking perhaps they turned on some idiot AI. And they don't want to back down and admit they did it wrong.
It is my experience, that Outlook is not a reliable e-mail service. Sometimes e-mails are not delivered, or only delivered hours later. When they are delivered, even as a paying customer, they are downloaded so slowly, that I had to wait 10 minutes to get all my e-mails, while my 1 EUR per month Posteo provider delivers in seconds.
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.
My clients have been experiencing this forever; the logs SAY "temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation." but really the emails are never going to get delivered. I have to get MailChimp or Mailgun to rotate the IPs.
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.
For these large services it seems that small companies should be allowed to sue them.
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.
I'm in the privileged position to advise clients to move away from hotmail/live if they want uninterrupted email delivery.
It's not just Outlook, it's all MS email products as well as Yahoo.
These are emails that our customers have specifically requested and we get support tickets blaming us.
It's been like this for years.
We experienced this exact error this week. Only affected outlook.com users, and not 365 users. Had to supply MS support with proof of ownership of the IP. The whole process took about a week to resolve.
It feels like there's quite a lot of spin on this. There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected. It only really seems to mention Estonia, and probably only a region of it.
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.
Having to explain to customers that they didn't receive an email because Outlook has a multi-stage set of email servers and the inside ones reject due to the edge (antispam) servers is always interesting.
Everyone who runs an email server knows Microslop doesn't care about receiving its customer's emails. The best thing you can do is migrate away.
I was using outlook for communicating with businesses as it is often what they use. Some of them just could not send a response back to me, so I am not using outlook anymore. Just normal Microslop stuff
Just had a friend reach out yesterday about this issue. His outlook account for 10+ years started having issues receiving emails from his dad and a company he works with.
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).
A question related to the outlook.com false spam mail problem... Why are incoming emails to outlook.com so large? 15KB minimum for a text email with just a title. Equivalent Gmail to/from Apple Mail is just a couple of KB.
I wonder if Microsoft actually likes running their free email service still. They wiped a ton of old Hotmail and Live.com emails some years ago (and then allowed new people to register those deleted names). I imagine they don't get much out of it anymore.
I created my first Outlook account when I was young. Now, 30 years later and its still my primary account. I can't imagine how I would migrate to another email address if Microslop would begin ruining Outlook by forced subscription or something. My digital life is in M$ hands at the moment.
A few years ago, in my university we have a big problem at the beginning of the semester to contact ~10K students, in particular when they register to our Moodle platform and the server sends them a message.
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.)
I was unable to reach a business this week who host their email on Office 365. Any email I sent would bounce with:
550 5.7.520 Message blocked because it contains content identified as spam. AS(4810)'
Something is rotten in the state of Outlook
I've had this exact problem for years. My IP addresses have been used for 15+ years for sending e-mail, they are spam-free, but Microsoft keeps blocking them. Every two months or so I have to ask them to unblock the IP again, then I can send mails to Outlook again, until they just random decide to block me again. It's an absolute clown show.
As long term Outlook.com user all I can say it's their service is extremely unreliable, my emails are either not delivered at all or end up in junk mail, some emails I don't receive at all or my partners are rate limited sometimes receiving their emails with hours long delays.
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.
It's has been like this for a long time. For me hotmail is unusable because some emails just never arrive due to their spam filtering.
I’m guessing they connected CoPilot to the inbound filter and it is doing stupid and unexpected things.
Very happy I decided to ditch outlook (and did it) this year after 10+ years. Every other year some part of the system would break, deliverability, authentication or 2FA. More ads, less value.
Eh. Another product driven into ground by Microslop
I've stopped diagnosing outlook/hotmail/live delivery issues about 12 years go, they simply do not give a single fuck about their customers. It used to be different, about 18 years ago orso, they had ways to contact them and resolve such issue.
fuck big tech :)
This is one of those articles that demonstrates why email should be distributed. Letting Google and Microsoft run email for the planet is just asking for problems. There are some technical demands to running email services, but they are still in reach of the technically inclined individual or organization. If for no other reason, it would help keep the big mail service providers honest.
microslop should start focusing on real world problem than overhyped ai bubble.
My company has been massively affected by this over the past month.
It sucks having to tell customers "this is on Microsoft's end, we're trying to work through it with them but we don't have an ETA and can't say more than that" because Microsoft support is absolutely useless. The other day we changed some DMARC/SPF records around and that seemed to do the trick but now it appears to just be a coincidence.
"whatever Microslop is doing"
Indirect reference to this recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230704
Ever since Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft entered the AI age, the quality went downhill. Someone should analyse this objectively since right now this may be more of an impression. But people are noticeably angrier than they used to be about Microsoft, say, 5 years ago, to today.
This has plagued us for years. We send quite a lot of transactional email (about 150k emails per day), and there have been several times where Microsoft blocked our server. Usually it is because Microsoft has banned an entire netblock, that our server just happens to be sitting in. I have seen them do this to IPs fro Hetzner, Linode, Amazon AWS (SES), etc. And yeah we've signed up for their junk mail reporting service, and we have all our DNS records dialed in perfectly.
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!