Missing Emails on Hotmail or MSN

[xoxoxoBruce]

Hotmail users and email server admins, beware: you may be unknowingly caught in the crossfire of Microsoft's war on spam. Unintended casualties include legitimate emails from domains with well-established reputations, which are systematically blocked with absolutely no notice and little recourse.

The chief culprit is the inaptly named SmartScreen, a proprietary spam control technology the software Goliath rolled out to great fanfare several years ago. While the filtering mechanism appears to be making some headway in eradicating Viagra come-ons and nasty phishing attempts, the victory comes at a price: an untold number of legitimate emails are blocked with no warning to either sender or intended recipient.

More.

[smurfalicious]

Microsoft... whaddya expect?

but I'm liking the gmail.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Speaking of Gmail, if you use Outlook as many do, especially at work...

Sure, Outlook has got an archive feature and even a backup plugin for your personal folders (Outlook 2003/2002). But this obviously wouldn’t work if that software itself was the one that crashed, or if your computer’s hard disk bit the dust.

Enter GMail: Turns out you can configure it as a backup of sorts (and still let you use Outlook in a normal way). In GMail’s Settings > Accounts tab, you can ask it to get mails from your other email accounts, fetch and store the emails (directly to the Archived folder, bypassing the inbox), and leave a copy of the emails on the server for your Outlook to fetch later on.

The tutorial from Gmail’s Help Center has a step-bystep direction on how to do this: Link

[skysidhe]

I was having a proplem with hotmail and the new 'windows live' but reinstalled internet 7 it fixed the problem. It may have been a coincidence but it worked all the same.

[smurfalicious]

grassy-ass, bruce

[mbpark]

Hello,

Hotmail and AOL have been dropping many emails if the senders don't have:

1. An SPF record for their domain that shows who can send the mail.
2. Reverse DNS lookup records for the mail server.
3. A properly configured mail server (i.e. not on a blacklist, no relaying allowed, some AV/filtering installed).

If you don't have these three things on your mail server, chances are that AOL/CompuServe, Hotmail, and other large ISPs are dropping your email.

I have had to work through this issue with multiple customers that use AOL, Hotmail, and other services, and the first two issues (SPF records and reverse DNS lookup) are what prevents mail from being sent to many AOL and Hotmail accounts. It looks like they've really turned up the filtering a notch.

Mitch

[Shawnee123]

yahoo and hotmail throw emails from the Dept of Ed to students into quarantine as a general rule, from what I've heard.

[mbpark]

The Dept. of Ed. doesn't usually have sysadmins who know how to properly lock down and configure a mail server, in my experience. Neither does Congress, but that's a different story .

Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and the rest of the large ISPs are simply trying to enforce the RFCs so that their customers don't get spammed.

Unfortunately, many small business, web hosting, government, and education mail servers aren't maintained by sysadmins who know how to configure such things as antivirus, patch/vulnerability management, anti-spam configurations under Sendmail, Exchange, or your mail server of choice, DNS management, and firewalls.

The larger ISPs and shops that have somewhat of a clue don't have a problem here. The problem is that setting up a mail server safely these days requires a lot of work and knowledge that most sysadmins do not have. The issue is that you have to know areas which were once at least three different domains to at least get AOL to see your mail. And no, I am not kidding about the last part.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by mbpark

The Dept. of Ed. doesn't usually have sysadmins who know how to properly lock down and configure a mail server, in my experience. Neither does Congress, but that's a different story .

part.

See, I've always wondered about that. Thanks!