Hotmail.com, MSN.com, Live.com, Outlook.com Blocking Emails

[Admin]

Recently there has been an increase in reports of unreceived emails sent from the Organ Forum to recipients with email accounts at Hotmail.com, MSN.com, live.com and outlook.com. Microsoft owns and operates these service providers. If you are using one of these email providers, be aware that your ability to receive emails from the Organ Forum may be compromised.

This could affect your ability to complete your registration, reset or recover your password, and receive emails from other Forum members.

Why Is This Happening?
Typically, these issues occur because our email server ends up on your email provider's blacklist. Email providers use blacklists to block email servers sending spam. The problem is that legitimate email senders on the same server, such as the Organ Forum, are also blocked. Email providers resort to blacklisting rather than more sophisticated spam detection solutions, because it's cheap and dirty, keeps their customers happy with less perceived spam, and saves the provider money while keeping their customers ignorant of the fact that legitimate email sent to them is potentially blocked.

On the server side of things, the issue is also financial, and most ISPs resort to shared email servers for their small customers, even if those customers are using dedicated or VPS servers for their websites. Once a server has been blacklisted, it is extremely difficult to get it removed.

What We're Doing
We've requested that our ISP move our account to a different email server. The problem is that there's no way of knowing whether that server is blacklisted or will become blacklisted in the future. In the long term we are exploring decoupling the site's email server from our ISP and moving to a more robust dedicated email solution; however, this might not be practical due to cost considerations and the funding level of this site.

What You Can Do
If you are using one of the Microsoft hosted accounts above, you can start by going into your email account settings adding organforum.com to your safe-senders list; however, this might not be an effective solution if Microsoft is blocking these emails at the server level. A better solution would be to use an account from another provider for your Organ Forum email account. See the FAQ to see how to change your Organ Forum email account.

The Irony of the Situation
The Organ Forum software uses email confirmation as one of the methods to reduce the presence of spammers here. Spammers will often use stolen or bogus email address when registering, so confirming the validity of email addresses helps weed them out.

[Wes]

Email providers resort to blacklisting rather than more sophisticated spam detection solutions, because it's cheap and dirty, keeps their customers happy with less perceived spam, and saves the provider money while keeping their customers ignorant of the fact that legitimate email sent to them is potentially blocked.

As an e-mail provider with over 10 million mailboxes...........that's not 100% accurate. But anyhow.

Good news - at the moment you're not listed on any of the major blacklists. Either you've managed to get de-listed, or your issue wasn't RBLs (properly-implemented RBL rejections will show up as 571 messages in your mail log).

Something you should address immediately: add txt records in your DNS for SPF. Last I looked, Microsoft relied fairly heavily on SPF at its content filter stage. I don't know if they back-feed their content filter stuff into private RBLs or now.

Wes

[Admin]

This problem has been resolved and emails are successfully being sent to these domains.