Random brain drops
Update on the Yahoo! and HotMail email problems
I've been in contact with both Yahoo! and HotMail regarding the issues I've been having sending mail to both providers. Yahoo! was a total pain to deal with. I got canned responses and incredibly poor help. Apparently though it worked as I can now send email to Yahoo! addresses.
Microsoft HotMail on the other hand was the total opposite. I got an email back that, while it could have been a form email, looked like a human had actually read the support request. This was within an hour of contacting them. I was told that "SmartScreen" had blocked me:
We have identified that messages from your IP 66.197.158.69 are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen's filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn't spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless.
Less than 12 hours later I got another email indicating the the problem had been taken care of. I'm guessing that they added my IP to a white list of some sort. I can send emails to HotMail accounts with no problem now.
I've got to say that Microsoft really impressed me with this. I'm not exactly a big ISP but they responded professionally and quickly. I'm still a bit frustrated that their mail system accepts my mail with a 250 response and then sends it to the bit bucket but at least there is a reasonable remedy.
So as to my previous post - it turns out that Yahoo! mail would benefit greatly by being purchased by Microsoft. They could learn alot about being a good netizen.
Posted at 09:04AM Apr 29, 2008 by Scott Dunbar in General | Comments[0]