TagHotmail

March 17, 2015

Mythbusting deliverability and engagement

By laura

2 Min read

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17March

Yesterday I published an article talking about an engagement webinar hosted by the EEC and DMA. I made a couple predictions about what would be said. ISPs do monitor engagement, even if they do it differently than senders thought. Engagement is important for inbox delivery at some ISPs. Different ISPs have different ways of making inbox decisions. Engagement will matter more in the future. And...

January 5, 2015

Email predictions for 2015

By laura

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05January

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on...

February 26, 2014

ISPs speak at M3AAWG

By laura

6 Min read

4 comments

26February

Last week at M3AAWG representatives from AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook spoke about their anti-spam technologies and what the organizations were looking for in email. This session was question and answers, with the moderator asking the majority of the questions. These answers are paraphrased from my notes or the MAAWG twitter stream from the session. What are your biggest frustrations? AOL: When...

November 21, 2013

Hotmail having a bad day

By laura

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21November

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...

August 20, 2013

"Blocked for Bot-like Behavior"

By laura

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20August

An ESP asked about this error message from Hotmail and what to do about it. “Bot-like” behaviour usually means the sending server is doing something that bots also do. It’s not always that they’re spamming, often it’s a technical issue. But the technical problems make the sending server look like a bot, so the ISP is not taking any chances and they’re going to...

April 29, 2013

SNDS is back

By laura

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29April

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...

December 26, 2012

Hotmail issues

By laura

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26December

A number of people, both at ESPs and on the mailops mailing list, are reporting problems at Hotmail. The most common reports are senders getting Site hotmail.com (65.55.92.152) said in response to MAIL FROM (452 Out of memory) during the SMTP session. There isn’t much senders can do about this. Hotmail is going to have to fix their resource issue. This may be limited to certain mail...

December 6, 2012

Hotmail moves to SPF authentication

By laura

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15 comments

06December

Hotmail has recently stopped using Sender ID for email authentication and switched to authenticating with SPF. The protocol differences between SenderID and SPF were subtle and most senders who were getting a pass at Hotmail were already publishing SPF records. From an email in my inbox from September: Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; sender-id=pass (sender IP is 65.55.240.72) header...

July 31, 2012

Outlook.com

By laura

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31July

The big news in email today is Microsoft’s announcement of the next version of Hotmail: Outlook.com. This does appear to be an attempt to compete with a host of Google’s offerings. Not only does Outlook.com include Skype and access to social media accounts, but it also includes web app versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 7GB of storage space. I’m not sure how actively...

December 14, 2011

Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

By laura

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14December

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October. All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long...