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Summary: Mail not being delivered is an unfortunately common problem. There's no magic answer, but I'll look at some of the reasons your mail not be delivered. Whenever I send e-mail to Hotmail subscribers, they never receive it and it never bounces back. I'm sending mail from my domain-based e-mail address through my Netscape 7.2 e-mail client. In other words, it's not a Netscape account. Netscape is just the e-mail client, and I can receive and send other mail perfectly. I only have problems with Hotmail. Everyone else seems to receive my mail this way. This is driving me crazy. Me too. I'm one of the admins for a fairly large mailing list and we face this type of problem frequently. Last week it was HotMail subscribers, but only those that were signed up for the "digest" version of our mailing list. A couple of months ago it was AOL users, but only some, and not always the same ones. Our email infrastructure has become frighteningly fragile. And it's all because of spam. • If the email doesn't make it through, and there's no bounce message returned, it's likely that it was filtered as spam. Now I can hear you screaming already: "But it wasn't spam!!!" I know, I know. That's the terribly frustrating part. The problem is that email recipients are also screaming. They're screaming "How do I stop all this spam?" And ISPs and email providers such as HotMail, AOL and others, are scrambling to try and put into place solutions that halt, or at least seriously reduce the number of spam messages that get delivered to their customers. The problem is that they sometimes go overboard, and mark legitimate email as spam. "There's simply no way to guarantee that your email will
be delivered, or guarantee that you'll find if it was or not."
Now, "marking" it as spam is annoying enough, but if that's all they did, that'd actual be less of a problem, since we'd still be able to look at it and decide what to do with it. Unfortunately, they've also taken to simply blocking and discarding much of what they see as spam. And naturally, "what they see as spam" is a moving target. In attempts to improve the spam detection rate or react to the latest wave of actual spam, most folks are continually updating and upgrading the algorithms they use to tell spam from legitimate mail. In the HotMail example I mentioned I pointed out that only mailing list subscribers that were getting the "digest" version of our mailing list were affected - folks getting the mailing list content in individual messages continued to receive them without problem. HotMail had decided that something about our digests looked like spam, and began discarding them. I assume they got complaints, because about a week later, they suddenly began to be delivered again. For a while AOL used a technique called "rate limiting" - meaning that it would only accept so much mail in a certain amount of time from a particular sender. If you were trying to send more than that, you were likely a spammer, and the excess was discarded. What they failed to take into account were legitimate mailing list servers hosting multiple mailing lists that were attempting to send legitimate email across several mailing lists to a lot of AOL customers that had explicitly subscribed and requested it. After a while and many complaints, this technique also seems to have abated. It sucks. Email providers are attempting to provide a valuable and legitimate service to their customers by blocking spam. And yet in their attempts to do so, they're often over-aggressively blocking legitimate mail, with no real recourse for legitimate senders. So what can you do? Well, I'll start by saying that there's no silver bullet. There's simply no way to guarantee that your email will be delivered, or guarantee that you'll find if it was or not. That's simply the nature of the world right now. But there are things you can do to stack the deck in your favor.
As you can see, there aren't many concrete steps that can guarantee your email delivery. Without a bounce message telling you why, it becomes a guessing game. The best steps to take when you encounter a problem are to simply make sure that you're being a good email citizen, track down what clues you can, and possibly follow up with the ISP with which you're having delivery issues. Related:
Article 10644 | Posted August 22, 2006 |
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If yahoo provides this type of service, you will loose business slowly.
Posted by: sanjaydash at January 11, 2007 5:53 PMWe are still fighting just to hear from Hotmail. They will simply not respond to my emails to request reasoning why theya re blocking my mail server that is not a relay and only has 12 domains on it. I have monitored the mail and it is now way an excessive amount. They simple refuse mail from my sever's ip.
Posted by: Ross Cornette at January 16, 2007 12:20 PMJust thought I would chime in here. I work for a online social network and we send millions of mail on a daily basis. Both newsletters to legitimate users as well as relay from legit users to other users are processed through the same mail cluster. Hotmail has caused us to re-architect parts of our mail cluster because, like mentioned in a previous post, hotmail has deemed legitimate mail from our host(s) as spam despite all our efforts to reform mail headers, educate users, enroll in hotmails "Junk e-mail" reporting program and "Smart Network Data services". Yet we STILL get blocked on a daily basis. What's missing I ask? Well, simply put, we have not paid the $20k fee to the 3rd party "sender score certification" program http://www.senderscorecertified.com/. So while we wait the 90 days for this to process, I have stumbled across an error we get in the mailer logs that has helped us in curbing the block rate by hotmail and I hope it will help you too. (I am using Port25's PMTA v3.2) The error is related to Hotmail's rate limiting and thus can be curbed by configuring your sending agent to reduce the amount of mail that is being sent once it receives this error:
2007-01-25 11:26:28 SMTP service unavailable: "421 The mail server IP connecting to Windows Live Mail / Hotmail server has exceeded the rate limit allowed. For troubleshooting information, go to http://postmaster.msn.com" received from mx3.hotmail.com (65.54.245.72) while connected from mail.mydomain.com (xxx.xx.xx.xxx) to mx3.hotmail.com (65.54.245.72)
with this error now in my armory, I was able to configure our mail server to detect this error, and once detected, set the application to go into "back-off" mode, and send only +n number of messages per hour. Since there is no way to tell what the rate limit is set to on hotmail's servers, it has been a trial-and-error thing. This has prevented us from being blocked, but of course will increase the amount of time it takes to deliver a message...but it will get there.
Hope this helps some of you out there having the same issue.
Regards,
-Jesse
Posted by: Jesse Alvarez at January 29, 2007 10:26 AMHotmail has a horrible system in place. We send millions of e-mails and I can say that AOL is the "benchmark" of postmasters. As a tech guy that used to hate AOL as a service, I LOVE AOL because of how brilliant they handle postmaster requests. AOL even has postmaster phone support with no hold times! Hotmail.. with their dodgy systems and ignored requests.. no phone support... nobody to help... can't make heads or tails of what's going on.
Only Hotmail will delete e-mail at the router... AOL sure doesn't. if you're blocked at AOL you get a nice little 421 error and a link to tell you exactly why you are being blocked for EVERY email. THANK you AOL.
MSN/Hotmail would probably staff a few more people in the postmaster department if the word got out they were censoring email and people started switching to the new FREE AOL... SPREAD THE WORD!
Posted by: Brent at February 22, 2007 7:09 AM-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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My experience with AOL has been exactly the opposite of what you're
describing.
People fail to get email that they've requested, and without
notification to either the recipient or the sender. AOL has been
particularly UNhelpful in helping the organizations I've been dealing
with. As a result we've basically given up trying to get AOL to work. We
now recommend to our members that they use an email account other than
an AOL account.
Leo
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Posted by: Leo Notenboom at February 22, 2007 11:05 AMeevBeou5gHDSurVi8v7EA5I=
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I had a great experience with AOL getting removed from a spam list b/c of a hacked mail form. Now yahoo and hotmail were horrible... i still cannot get them to allow my mail through... also hotmail nor yahoo even respond... AOL required a single phone call and w/in hours i was receiving mail again. AOL postmaster is the best i have dealt with yet.
Posted by: Ron Davis at March 27, 2007 8:28 PMYour article is interesting all I'm trying to do is get in touch with my niece at hotmail.com.Every time I try it won't go through.I have multiple sclerosis and can get confused.Need a simple answer.
Posted by: Sandy McKee at February 26, 2008 4:48 PMI checked the error code I was getting under search...aol 554. Seems my aol friends were not getting my messages..Daemon Mailto returned...Found out I had a signature on my e mail and their account did not accept attachments. I took off my signature..under options on my yahoo page and now all goes well. Just check out the error code you are getting and maybe you can figure yours out as well
Posted by: Dixie at March 1, 2008 2:57 PMIt's a shame that spammers have ruined the email system. It's even more a shame that legitimate companies can not get their subscribed emails through, BUT, I have to say that a lot of the legitimate companies cheat a little too, and when they get caught at it they seem to complain the loudest while excusing their behaviour. One client I worked for actually got mad at me because I would not punch a hole in my personal email system for his service. I told him Nopeddlers.com was under total user control and if they wanted his stuff they would get it. Came to find out what he was calling legal was purchasing mailing lists. We all know that most lists are scraped from tons of illegitimate sources and so I will end this with a person peice of advice. If your email service is getting blocked you need to be more legitimate than you already think you are. As for me I get all the spam protection I need from my current provider, and believe me when I say I ONLY GET WHAT I WANT.
Please try and remember something. Email was meant to improve the quality of life, not become a platform for floods of spam just because you dont have to pay to send it.
Configure your mailers to use true and accurate headers
Provide a legitimate automated and easy to use unsubscribe link
Make the link CONSPICUOUS!!!
Remeber if you don't offend the recipient in the first place you will stand a better chance of not getting reported.
Posted by: Ron Haines at March 25, 2008 3:37 PMI am using a quite legitimate email address and have definitely done nothing to have these people at Hotmail block my emails to private recipients.
It is disgusting that these companies can be so heavy-handed and able to take cart-blanch action to interfere with personal mail.
Up to this week all my emails have been getting through and there has been absolutely no reason for this to have happened.
It is a pity that legal action cannot be taken against these parasites for dealing out unwarranted punishment to innocent people.
Thanks,
Posted by: Graham Johnson at October 11, 2008 10:56 PMGraham.