TagMicrosoft

Microsoft changes

There’s been quite a bit of breakage and delivery failure to various Microsoft domains this month. It started with them changing the MX for hotmail.co.uk, then the MX for hotmail.fr… and both these things seem to have broken mail. I also saw a report this morning that some of the new MXs have TLS certificates that don’t match the hostnames. What’s going on? Historically...

The cycle goes on

Monday I published a blog post about the ongoing B2B spam and how annoying it is. I get so many of these they’re becoming an actual problem. 3, 4, 5 a day. And then there’s the ongoing “drip” messages at 4, 6, 8, 12 days. It is getting out of control. It’s spam. It’s annoying. And most of it’s breaking the law. But, I can also use it as blog (and twitter...

Microsoft deprecating SmartScreen filters

At the beginning of the month Microsoft announced that they were deprecating the SmartScreen filters used by the desktop Microsoft mail clients. These are the filters used in Exchange and various version of Outlook mail. This is yet further consolidation of spam filtering between the Microsoft free webmail domains, Office365 hosted domains and self hosted Exchange servers.  The online services...

Improving Outlook Email Display

Today Litmus announced they had partnered with Microsoft to fix many of the rendering issues with Outlook. Congrats, Litmus! This is awesome. I know a lot of folks have tried to get MS to the table to fix some of the problems with Outlook. Take a bow for getting this off the ground. According to Litmus, the partnership has two parts. A rendering bugs feedback loop New Microsoft email clients...

Ask Laura: Is the SmartScreen Filter Really Smart?

Dear Laura, Can you help me understand the Microsoft SmartScreen filter? I’m working on a new project and we’re not able to get to the inbox at Microsoft.  Our SNDS/JMRP health is great, not a problem that we can see, but when we contact the support team we’re told we’re being flagged by SmartScreen. It seems impossible to try and find any information or ways to rectify this issue...

July 2015: The Month in Email

Once again, we reviewed some of the ways brands are trying (or might try) to improve engagement with customers. LinkedIn, who frequently top lists of unwanted-but-legitimate email, announced that they’ll be sending less mail. Josh wrote about giving subscribers options for both the type and frequency of messages, and about setting expectations for new subscribers. In each case, it’s about...

Microsoft Send

Microsoft Send is a new mail client by Microsoft for iPhones and soon Windows Phone and Android phones. Send is designed to send quick, short messages to contacts. Instead of building a chat application build on a proprietary protocol, Send sends and receives its messages over email and uses your existing mailbox to handle the messages. What makes Send neat is that I can start a conversation...

Office365 checking DMARC on the inbound

According to a recent blog post, Office365 is starting to evaluate incoming messages for DMARC. I talked a little bit about DMARC in April when Yahoo started publishing a p=reject message. DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What DMARC does is allow domain owners to publish policy statements in DNS telling receiver domains what to do with messages that...

Outlook 365 having a bad day

I’ve seen scattered reports today that some mail to the Outlook 365 servers is failing. This has been confirmed by ZDNet. Only folks with a Office 365 account can log in and see the status messages, but there are some folks on the mailop list posting updates from the website. Attempts to mail to affected domains results in this response: 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent server...

Ignoring opt-outs

One of the marketing solutions to the spam problem is just to have recipients opt out. We think that commercial e-mail should always — and I emphasize always — provide for a way for the consumer to say: “I don’t want to hear from you again. One bite of the apple is enough. Having heard from you, I don’t want you to send me email again.” So we think that the approach of...

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