Hotmail, Outlook & Live

Sending to and from Hotmail, Outlook & Live

If you are sending from or to hotmail.com, outlook.com or live.com, then there is a medium risk that your email will face issues. Below are the most common reasons:

1. Microsoft take a very aggressive but flawed approach to blacklist IP addresses. Microsoft will block network subnets. Subnets hold hundreds and sometimes thousands of IP addresses. So for any one bad IP address that may be responsible for sending SPAM, they block the entire range.Lets put this in perspective in another way. There are 500 people that live in a town and Microsoft are the police. One person in this town breaks the law but they can’t be bothered doing an investigation. So their solution is to lockup ALL the people in that town. Our solution is to lower the domain reputation used by these providers.
2. Microsoft take a very aggressive but flawed approach to dealing with SPAM because they allow users of Hotmail, Outlook & Live accounts to flag any inbound mail as unwanted or “Junk” for any reason what so ever. The mail does not have to be scanned or processed as junk, it simply needs to be flagged by the recipient as unwanted or “Junk” and Microsoft servers will automatically start blocking the sending domain and the IP addresses of the mail server it was sent from. The problem with this is that Microsoft are allowing their users to determine what domains and email addresses get blocked without any qualification.
3. Microsoft has one set of rules for Microsoft’s servers and another set of rules for non Microsoft servers. Mail sent from Outlook, Exchange, Live and Hotmail, i.e an IP address belonging to Microsoft, is exempt from any form of SPAM checking. Furthermore emails sent from Hotmail servers are injected with ads (with active links) which in itself is SPAM. It forces many service providers to take strict measures against Microsoft’s mail servers. So there is no good reason to use Hotmail, Outlook & Live unless you don’t care about email delivery.
4. You can setup a free hotmail.com, outlook.com or live.com account with no validation in 1 minute. This is ideal for spammers, scammers to send spoofing and phishing emails with no validation and full anonymity. This process only helps and promotes SPAMMERS to scam more people. 

So why does Microsoft do this? 

One good reason is that all the problems above create business opportunities for Microsoft. Its a good way to raise false flags and shift the blame on to other internet service providers. Then using their marketing power to spin misinformation and  promote their own business products as a way to address the SPAM issue. 

We know this because because we have reported thousands of issues to Microsoft for incorrectly listing IP addresses but they have a lack of willingness or knowledge to address these problems properly, instead they choose to promote their own products and convince customers to buy their mail products. 

So if your recipient uses Hotmail, Outlook & Live and they want to receive your emails, tell them to get a real email address with a real domain and not one that fosters SPAM.

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