Widespread Microsoft phishing warnings today

People throughout the industry are reporting phishing notices in a lot of mail going through Microsoft properties this morning. I even got one in an email from one of my clients earlier today

Multiple people have talked to employees inside Microsoft, and I suspect their customers have been blowing up support about this. I know they’re aware, I suspect they’re frantically working on a fix.
Update 11 am PDT: It appears this filter is firing when mail has the word “hotmail” in it. This includes if non displaying text (like CSS) has the word in it. It feels like they were attempting to mitigate something and wrote a rule that wasn’t quite right. Still no word on a fix, but don’t panic.
Update 12:30 PDT: Reports are that the warning is gone. No word from Microsoft, but as long as things get fixed we don’t need it.

Related Posts

Getting unblocked at Outlook.com

It’s been a crazy week here at M3AAWG. I have a lot of stuff to blog about, but I think one of the really important things to get out is the new unblock request page at Outlook / Hotmail.
https://sender.office.com
Submit your IPs and it will be reviewed.
(Apologies for the repeated bad links. I’m blaming con crud, lack of sleep and MSN/Hotmail/Office/Outlook for having so many domains I can’t keep them straight. I have finally gotten it right and tested it.)

Read More

Microsoft MXs changed over

Today on MailOp it was announced that the migration of Microsoft freemail domains to the office 365 backend. Over the next week the mx*.hotmail.com mail servers will stop working. Check your settings, folks, and make sure you’re correctly querying DNS before sending.

Read More

Happy 2018

This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But I’ve been thinking about what might be on the horizon in 2018 and how that will affect email marketing.

Read More