Microsoft announced a number of changes to the Hotmail interface today. It doesn’t look like this will affect how mail is received, but will affect how users can interact with it.
As always, the best advice I can give you is send mail people want and like.
There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name.
Read MoreI’ve been working through some Hotmail issues with a client over the last few months. One of the things that has become clear to me is how little Hotmail actually does with SPF records. In fact, Hotmail completely ignored my client’s SPF record and continued to deliver email into the inbox.
This isn’t just a sender that had a “well, we think most of our email will come from these IPs but aren’t telling you to throw away email that doesn’t” record. In fact, this client specifically said “if email doesn’t come from this /28 range of email addresses, then it is unauthorized and should be thrown away.” The email was being sent from an IP outside of the range listed in the SPF record.
As part of the process involved in fixing the delivery problems, I had the client update their SPF record and then I enrolled their domain in the SenderID program at Hotmail. This didn’t have any effect, though. Hotmail is still not checking SPF for this client. When I asked Hotmail what was going on they said, “We do not do lookups on every sender’s mail.”
So, there you have it folks. The last bastion of SPF/SenderID has abandoned the technology. Even a totally invalid SPF record doesn’t matter, mail can still reach the inbox at Hotmail.
Ken announced yesterday that Holomaxx dropped their suits against Ironport and ReturnPath. Suits against Yahoo and Hotmail are still active.
In the Yahoo case, there is a case management meeting on January 14th.
In the Microsoft case, a response the complaint is due by December 17th.
I’m not quite sure what happened to prompt this change, but I think it makes it even more unlikely that the case will be successful. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of ISPs in these kinds of cases.
EDIT: I’d link to Ken’s article, but I appear to have closed that tab and I can’t find it on his website. I’ll add it as soon as I do.
EDIT: Ken’s announcement