This is a followup from a post a few weeks ago about authentication changes at Office365. We have some more clarity on what is going on there. This is all best information we have right now. Microsoft is now requiring authentication to match the visible from address in order to reach the inbox at Office365. That means, either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain must align (in the DMARC sense) to...
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...
One of these things is just like the other Canonicalization is about comparing things to see if they’re the same. Sometimes you want to do a “fuzzy” comparison, to see if two things are interchangeable for your purposes, even if they’re not exactly identical. As a concrete example, these two email addresses: (Steve) steve@wordtothewise.com “Also Steve”...
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...
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure. A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and...
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...
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. 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...
The obvious application of machine learning for email is to send spam to the junk/bulk folder. Most services use some level of machine learning for filters. Places like Gmail have extensive machine learning filters to filter spam and unwanted mail away from their users. Some organizations are taking the filtering process a step further. Almost every mail client more advanced than PINE has the...
One of the new bits of information to come out of the EEC15 deliverability discussions is how Hotmail is looking at engagement differently than other webmail providers. Many webmail providers really do look at overall engagement with a mail when making delivery decisions. And this really impacts new subscribers the most. If there is a mailing where a lot of subscribers are engaged, then new...
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...
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