Recently I received a complaint from a customer because his emails sent to Hotmail were going to the Junk mail folder. I tried and realized that all of my emails from ALL 10 SERVERS are going to Hotmail's Spam Folder. Yes, I do have a valid reverse DNS entry, yes it resolves back to my server, yes, I do have an SPF record and yes, my nameservers are secure according to DNSReport.com.

So I spent an entire day reading about the issue on Hotmail's postmaster site. I signed up for their SDNS service and I realize that Hotmail is reporting to receive a lot of emails from my server...mostly spam. It looked kind of strange to me because they reported I had sent them 3000 emails per day from each server... However, none of my servers is sending that amount of emails...

Alright. I looked at the complaints my IPs were getting. I realized that most were referring to forwarders my customers had set up on their account on my server. I.e. spam being sent to them on their account was getting forwarded to their Hotmail account. When they complained about the spam they did not want to report themselves (the IP of their own sites) but the original spammer... So I thought Hotmail's spam filter must really be crap if it does not even interprete complaints correctly. I was even talking to customers and they confirmed that they did not want to report us or themselves but the original spammer...

Ok...so I did contact Hotmail and they told me that I would have to disable the forwarders... Good. I came up with another idea. I mapped a new IP to my mailserver...one that was never used before. Howerver, I did configure Exim to only use that IP for one of my own domains hosted on the server. I set up a HELO DATA entry accordingly and a reverse DNS entry that also resolves back to the IP. Alright... So then I was sending another email to my test Hotmail account and again the email went to the Junk mail folder. Now imagine that... an entirely new IP that did not send a single email in like a year and the emails do still go to the junk mail folder. How can that possibly be ? So I responded to the email I had gotten from Hotmail's postmaster department.

Now it get's sick... Rather than my email being sent to their abuse department I got a mailer daemon message right back from them telling me that my email was spam. You can not even contact their postmaster address you know...it get's blocked as spam. Incredible !

So anyway... I went back to their SDNS site and added a few more server IPs. Now I have a server that I used in the past. There are no customers on it right now. The server is absolutely save. I monitor it's load and it is always around 0.01 or 0.02 because the server is inactive so there is nothing going on on that server. It has zero Emails on the mailing queue ! No emails being sent...no hacking activity. Now guess what: Hotmail reports 3000 spam emails comming from that server per day. Again: It's inactive...nobody on it and I am 100% sure that there is no hacking activity going on on it whatsoever..Exim's mailing queue is empty !

Now I understood... Hotmail does not monitor your IP address but monitors and blocks entire IP ranges. That means I do not have any chance of getting of of their stupid blacklist because servers close to mine are sending spam even if my servers are not even active. I'm really sick of them and it pisses me off I wasted my precious time with this ****. Customers are still angry cause I can not come up with a solution for the problem caused by the 11 year old children that Microsoft obviously employs for spam filter developement. I am just telling my customers: Sorry, I can't solve it because Microsoft's spam filter doesn't accept emails from shared hosting accounts.

Anyone else with similar experiences ?

1. Any spam forwarded from a user on your servers -> hotmail will result in 'complaints' from the msn service.

2. Resolution : Disable forwarders.

//Yeah, I didn't do it either but I'm just letting you know!

It isn't something i've ever run into or tried doing myself but is there any precedent for telling your clients that you won't accept @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com or similar email addresses as primary contacts?

In this day and age it seems like there's really no excuse for not having a legitimate email address from a legitimate domain. Maybe that's just me though.

#1: You didn't read my entire post... As I said I already tried an IP Address that was not active before. This mailserver IP and HELO was only assigned to my own domain name. Emails are STILL going to the Junk folder so disabling forwarders won't help at all because Hotmail is blocking entire ranges... I.e. they do not block 11.22.33.44 but they block and monitor 11.22.33.0/24

So there is nothing I can do. The server's around me are sending the spam. All of my servers in the various DCs are blacklisted and Hotmail reports 1000's of emails sent to them from servers that are completely empty simply because these are the emails they receive from the entire range. There is no way you can stop them from moving your mails to the Junk folder.

#2: I don't think that would work. Even if I did that I still had the problem that my customers can not send emails to Hotmail.

This is a persistent issue with all of the major ISP's and one you can do very little about. You're gonna take the blame for any spam received in those Hotmail/AOL accounts because you're the last hop before it gets to them.

The only thing you can do is implement aggressive spam filtering upstream of the forward, so the overall ratio of ham to spam is much higher than it is now while you're forwarding all of their mail to the remote address.

Brandon

Sure all of the big ones are bad but Hotmail is monitoring/blocking IP ranges which makes it not difficult but impossible to resolve issues.

He should add your domain to the safe list that hotmail has so they go to his inbox.

Make sure you also have an SPF record as well.

GoDaddy blocked an entire Class C once - and of course I was on there. It took me 4 days - about 20 emails from my gmail account since I was blocked and 10 phone calls, but they finally released my one IP for my mail server.

AOL also does the same thing from what I have read. They are trying to prevent spam but they get too much control.

He should add your domain to the safe list that hotmail has so they go to his inbox.

Here's a link to information on the safelist (http://postmaster.msn.com/Services.aspx#Safelist).

This is your best bet. This site has tons of information on staying off of MSN/Hotmail's blacklists.

Hotmail spam filter sucks. It blockes important emails and leaks spam.

Forwarders cause the same problem with AOL.
Also you should not send out bandwith or disk limit approaching emails as these get reported as spam.

You will also notice that renewal notices will be blocked by Hotmail anyway because of content so its not really worth letting people sign up with Hotmail addresses as they will probably not get a renewal notice.

Its interesting that the most aggressive content filtering is often from companies selling similar services to tthe ones we are sending emails about like domain name registration renewals.
Is that a coincidence?

Hello,

I have found a solution for JUNK mail problem with Hotmail. Even if you have a proper content it rejects your mail and put it in JUNK because the headers are not proper

I have created a solution you can check that at
revmakx dot com/softwares/mailing.html you can take a demo if you dont believe.

if you have any doubt you can contact me at info@revmakx.com

Thanks
Revmakx

My experience is that worrying about what people who still use Hotmail do or do not get in their inboxes is a waste of time.