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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:
"And it really is all about spam."
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:
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. Related:
• Recent Comments
Hi Leo, I had a similar problem a while back. All of my friends could not receive emails from my Dishmail account. I received no "bounce" and they never received my emails. I contacted Dishmail and they reported that Yahoo had blacklisted them as an email provider that sent too many spam emails or something along that vein. They said that they were negotiating with Yahoo and recommended that I contact Yahoo as well. I did contact Yahoo and after several complaints to them about this problem along with Dishmail's persistence, Yahoo finally lifted their ban. So the user might want to have his father check with his ISP to see if it's a similar scenario. Posted by: Andrea Schumann at May 15, 2008 06:54 AMI too have e mails that go missing, I thought that my ex boss had got someone to hack into my business email address, but i am still waiting for my ISP to get back to me, is it possible for someone to hack into an e mail address, and put a fliter in, and let some types of mail get through. Posted by: alan berry at May 20, 2008 02:24 PMThe other thing to consider is that sometimes things just "get lost in the mail." Seriously. I've been doing email for work etc. for nearly 2 decades now and periodically messages just disappear in the ether. No reason (and some of these happened long before spam filters etc.), so now when a message is important I either cc myself (so I can see it come back to me and feel somewhat assured it also got to the sender) or better, request a read receipt so I KNOW it got to the sender, or both. If I don't see my message come back to me (when I've cced myself) or get a read receipt in some reasonable period of time, I send it again, just to be sure. When it's business and the files are important, you can't take chances. I also check in with clients etc. who I think may be sending me things and I haven't seen them when I should, for the same reason. It may be spam filters, but sometimes it's just the electronic equivalent of bad sorting in the mail room (or worse, a lost mail bag). Which also happens with snail mail more than you care to think about. Cheers, Post a comment on "Why am I not getting some emails in my MSN Live Hotmail account?":
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