Hotmail having a bad day
Hotmail seems to be having a bad day, responding to a lot of delivery attempts with “554 Transaction failed” responses.
It’s not you, it’s them. They’re aware of the issue.
Related Posts
SNDS is back
- laura
- Apr 30, 2013
For years now, Microsoft has maintained Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) for anyone sending mail to Hotmail/Outlook/Live.com. This is a great way for anyone responsible for an IP sending mail to hotmail to monitor what traffic Hotmail is seeing from that IP address.
This morning I got up to a number of people complaining that logins were failing on the website and the API was down. I contacted the person behind SNDS and they confirmed there was a problem and they were fixing it.
Sometime this afternoon it was possible to login to the SNDS interface again, so it looks like they did fix it.
A bit of a warning, though, don’t expect to see any of the data from the last few days. There seems to be something with SNDS that means that when the service is down data isn’t collected or available. In the past when there have been problems, older data was not populated when the service came back.
Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail will converge
- josh
- May 1, 2015
Terry Zink posted two informative blog posts recently, the first being the change to unauthenticated mail sent over IPv6 to EOP and the second post about EOP (Office365 and Exchange Hosting) and Outlook.com/Hotmail infrastructure converging.
Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is the filtering system in place for Office 365 and hosted Exchange customers. Outlook.com/Hotmail utilized its own mail filtering system and provides SNDS/JMRP programs. EOP is setup for redundancy, failover, provides geo-region servers to serve customers, and has supported TLS for over a decade. Terry explains that Hotmail’s spam filtering technology is more advanced than EOP’s, but EOP’s backend platform is more advanced. The process to convert Outlook.com/Hotmail to use EOP’s filtering system started six months ago and is still a work in progress. Once completed, Outlook.com/Hotmail and Office365/EOP will share the same UX look and feel. The anti-spam technologies will be able to be shared between the two as they will share the same backend infrastructure.
Some of the challenges of merging the two systems include:
Hotmail having a bad day
- laura
- Nov 21, 2013
Looks like Hotmail / Microsoft is having a rather bad day. Their DNS seems to be intermittent. While they were down a while ago they were returning SERVFAIL for some DNS lookups, including MX lookups.
For senders who have the DNS data in their recursive resolvers, this will have no impact. For senders who either don’t have the data cached or who have the data expire before the servers come back online there may be a transient increase in the number of bounces at Microsoft domains (Hotmail, Outlook, MSN.com, office365.com and the Microsoft corporate domains including microsoft.com and their other domains like xboxone.com).