Summary: One of the casualties of the war against spam is reliable email deliverability. Sometimes mail simply never shows up. We'll look at what can be done.
•
This turns out to be a fairly common problem, and not just for Hotmail. Yahoo and other email services seem to suffer the same problem from time to time.
And no, I know of nothing you can do.
Strike that, I do know of one thing you can do, but you won't like it.
•
As you've described, the scenario is very, very simple:
-
Someone sends you an email
-
You don't get it
-
The sender doesn't get any indication that the mail wasn't delivered
It's the worst of all possible scenarios - you can't know what you didn't receive, and the sender has no indication that nothing was delivered. Neither of you realize that there's any problem until much, much later.
It's the most frustrating of all possible scenarios.
And to cover the stock recommendations:
-
Check your junk mail folder
-
Clear any filters you have set that might automatically act on incoming email
-
Add the sender's email address to your address book. On some email providers this acts as a kind of "whitelist", or at least increases the probability that email from that person will get delivered
-
Make sure that the sender isn't sending something that "looks like" spam. For example if his email is talking about enlarging body parts, then it's highly likely to get filtered as spam. Sadly it doesn't have to be that blatant - legitimate messages about breast cancer, free offers, business opportunities and more can often be confused with, and filtered as, spam
And it really is all about spam. Chances are that your email provider, Hotmail in this case, is simply being overly aggressive about filtering spam. (And unfortunately in doing so, there are actually reasonable arguments for not sending a bounce message - many spammers actually rely on bounce messages to either legitimize an email address, or to actually carry their spam message.)
So, what can you really do?
Aside from what I've listed so far, nothing.
I wish that email providers, particularly the free ones, gave you more direct control over what is, and is not, spam to you. Truly paying attention to your address book would go a long way to solving the issue, but as you can see that's not happening consistently.
So what's the one thing to do that I said you won't like?
Use a different email provider.
Stop using Hotmail.
Find an email provider that is more responsive to its customers needs. GMail currently appears to be the best of the free services, but email reliability is also worth paying for, if that's what it takes.
Article C3382 - May 14, 2008
As of this morning, I am not receiving any emails sent to me from ANYONE (not even people in my Contacts). I checked my blocked lists and that is OK. There are just a few email addresses there but they are not email addresses for people that are sending me mail.
HELP!!! I have important information being emailed to me and I am not receiving anything!!
Posted by: Cheryl at March 18, 2010 8:52 AMI'm not receiving emails to my account today. This AM early I had some, mostly from yesterday. I'm awaiting replies to some I sent out very early this AM and nothing....
Posted by: Shelly at March 18, 2010 8:53 AMI just called customer service because I too am unable to email tech support, it times out. They are doing system maintenance and assured me that all the incoming emails I haven't been able to receive will be queued until they are done. I dont know how to ever know if I received all the emails that were sent to me during this outage, but it's frustrating. I thought it was weird that I hadn't received any emails in a 5 hour span.
Posted by: Stephanie at March 18, 2010 9:11 AMHave not received an email from my hotmail account since 6:00 a.m. CDT this morning -- just over 5 hours now.
Can log into Hotmail and look at old messages. That's all. No sending, no receiving.
Posted by: Cathy at March 18, 2010 9:19 AMWell get ready for a flood of duplicate emails! boy, did they really screw up this time. I am now getting emails.....TONS OF THEM....FROM MONTHS AGO! They are all emails that I have already received when they were originally sent. My in box is a nightmare now!!!!
Posted by: Cheryl at March 18, 2010 10:34 AMThank you very much MSN....NOT!