Epic fail for Hotmail

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Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 3:34 pm

I have spent the past week very confused as to the whether my Hotmail account was working properly. Outside email was not coming through, even when sent from myself at my work address. I asked friends to mail me, other hotmail users not a problem.

Today I decided to go onto the Windows Live Centre to see if there was anything there! Well it would appear that there is a major problem. Some bright spark has coded in a reset of filters to send all mail to Junk. This junk is the set to delete immediately!

No warning! No message that they would be doing this or that perhaps it's part of some crazy new 'default security setting' or summat that Hotmail are rolling out "for your protection".

http://windowslivehelp.com/community/15.aspx

This shows how many people have the problem who have realised they have a problem! Not many.

I am job hunting (as part of my new work life) at the moment and who knows what I've missed out on! One person on the site says they have now lost important emails from their landlord.

My post on that site, along with others have yet to be replied to.

This is unacceptable and I am fuming, so I am writing to all the tech pubs I can think of....

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 3:55 pm

What jerks. Switch to gmail fast.

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 4:15 pm

They shouldn't just be able to reset your filters and/or preferences like that!

I have gmail but don't use it much, as I've had my hotmail account for years and that's everywhere.....

Maybe it's time.

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 4:56 pm

Don't switch to yahoo either. The will captcha you to death lately.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Reading that forum reminded me of this story about a small commercial plane flying into Seattle. It was night time, there was heavy fog and the radio was broken. The pilot had no idea where he was, or where the airport was. Then just as the fuel gauge read "empty", the fog lifted a bit and he saw a tall building with one light on. He throttled back as far as he dared, and flew as close to the building as he dared. One man was in the office working late. The pilot opened his window and yelled "where am I?". As he flew past he heard the guy answer "in an aeroplane." The pilot turned the plane and proceeded to make a perfect landing at the nearby airport. His passengers were astounded and asked how he managed to do it. "It's quite simple," he replied, "the answer that guy gave was 100% accurate and 100% useless. Therefore that was the Microsoft Technical Support offices and the airport is five miles due east from there."

The MS drones on that forum couldn't be more unhelpful if they tried. 99% of the time they don't even pass the Turing test.

I love the statistics:

In the last 24 hours:
2027 new questions
253 questions answered
606 solved questions

If I worked for Microsoft, those numbers would scare me s**tless.

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 6:11 pm

Maybe this explains why I have not been receiving any mail from Hotmail in the last 2 months in my Cayman Islands inbox. All mail to Hotmail accounts has gone without a reply. I can send mail back and forth between gmail and my work mail just fine.

If you guys have hotmail, it's time to check it. Send something to your gmail account and back.

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 6:16 pm

So that's why the lads that use hotmail are quiet.

edit: just checked my hotmail account but nothing changed there.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Aha!

RANT ALERT

If you browse that forum for any length of time you'll get used to seeing this cut-and-paste for any and all complaints about Hotmail rejecting incoming messages:

MS drone wrote:

I've escalated this issue to our Windows Live Hotmail Sender Support Team, but to speed up the resolution of the issue you may want to contact your domain admin and have them go to http://postmaster.live.com and review our policies and guidelines.

I know how email works, and this is plainly bad information. Nobody but Microsoft is responsible for them rejecting mail. Many of the people complaining are bona-fide senders of bulk-mail - subscribed newsletters and such. Their domain administrator is not to blame in any way for their mail getting rejected, and yet Microsoft is plainly trying to create a view in users' minds that their email provider is deficient in some way. Maybe we could stop there - Microsoft painting the opposition in a bad light in order to attract more custom.

But it gets worse. I went to http://postmaster.live.com, and what did I read?

MS policies and guidelines wrote:

The Sender ID Framework (SIDF) is an e-mail authentication technology protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and fraudulent e-mails (phishing) by verifying the domain name from which e-mail is sent. E-mail that is SIDF compliant can be delivered more reliably. Windows Live Hotmail currently uses the Sender ID field to provide additional input to the SmartScreenTM junk e-mail filter process, helping to determine if the e-mail or sender is legitimate. We recommend that senders publish their Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records to help pass any Sender ID authentication checks.

So Microsoft is pushing SIDF and making domain administrators the bad guys if they don't implement it. I wonder why they would do that. It turns out that SIDF is an extension of SPF. SPF seems perfectly adequate and is an open standard, unlike SDIF:

Wikipedia wrote:

The Sender ID proposal was the subject of controversy regarding intellectual property licensing issues: Microsoft holds patents[citation needed] on key parts of Sender ID and used to license those patents under terms that were not compatible with the GNU General Public License and which were considered problematic for free software implementations in general. On October 23, 2006, Microsoft placed those patents under the Open Specification Promise, which is compatible with free and open source licenses, but not with the most recent version of the GPL license, version 3.x.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - and if you don't play along, we'll just steal all your customers by lying to them.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2010 10:35 am

Quote:

their email provider is deficient in some way

In my case they are mine and they are deficient!

No way should they be able to change my filters like that without my knowledge.

I wrote again to a recruiter I'd contacted, he had sent me a reply..... Sad

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2010 11:22 am

sympathies for the problems

Ms Mockinatrix wrote:

my Hotmail account

i think this is where you were going wrong. Wink

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 13 Feb 2010 Posts: 1

[email protected] Twisted Evil

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 2:46 pm

I don't get it. If anyone sends you mail it goes to the junk folder and is immediately deleted? Or does it have to contain a filtered word? Either way, that sucks.

If you don't like Gmail, you might want to try http://www.gmx.com/ . I think it was similar to hotmail's interface. www.inbox.com or www.crawler.com are okay. A little slow and very simple looking.

Fastmail.fm has updated their interface but still only offers 10 pinche MB of space.

If you can get over Gmail's interface, I suggest the reading this post http://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1499076#1499076

Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 12:46 am

I've had to switch to gmail. Yahoo wouldn't let me send any messages. After doing the capcha every single time I get this:

Quote:

Your message was not sent

Your account has been temporarily blocked from sending messages. This block can be caused by sending messages that trigger our spam filters, or by having too many recipients in one email. We encourage you to review the contents and recipient list of your message, and try sending it at after an hour or two. Doing so will usually resolve the matter.
If you are still unable to send messages after a 24-hour period, please read our FAQ for more information and to request Customer Care assistance.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Mail Team

Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 5:13 am

^^^ My ditzy housewife had the same problem. Notice the lads don't seem to have it Evil or Very Mad