Discussion

Users fume over Outlook.com email 'carnage'

mmsc: I wonder if Microsoft actually likes running their free email service still. They wiped a ton of old Hotmail and Live.com emails some years ago (and then allowed new people to register those deleted names). I imagine they don't get much out of it anymore.

mrweasel: It's certainly not free to run and maybe it doesn't really make sense for Microsoft to run Outlook.com anymore, except that it's an easy way to motivate people to having a Microsoft account.Outlook.com certainly has to show up as an expense, one that Microsoft would like to reduce. When you look at what other providers charge for a single email account, it's hard to see Microsoft making money of Outlook.com. There's obviously something to be said for scale, but still, it must cost them something.

john_strinlai: >It's certainly not free to run and maybe it doesn't really make sense for Microsoft to run Outlook.com anymore, except that it's an easy way to motivate people to having a Microsoft account.it also funnels people into using exchange for work. more like a "marketing expense".

iamcalledrob: I was unable to reach a business this week who host their email on Office 365. Any email I sent would bounce with: 550 5.7.520 Message blocked because it contains content identified as spam. AS(4810)' For context, I was replying to an existing and very mundane email thread.Something is rotten in the state of Outlook

Ensorceled: My clients have been experiencing this forever; the logs SAY "temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation." but really the emails are never going to get delivered. I have to get MailChimp or Mailgun to rotate the IPs.It looks like all it takes is one person to mark your email as spam, even by accident. Note that these are mailing lists which they signed up for in MailChimp case OR transactional emails in the Mailgun case.It's only hotmail/outlook that we constantly have this issue with, Google etc. are all fine.

scandox: Often these "spam" reports by end users are just accidental clicks as well. Many of the abuse reports we get are like an email from someone's Mum and visibly legitimate. At other times there are users who use the Report Spam function as a kind of inbox management tool - a way of moving mail away so they don't have to see it because Trash or Delete or whatever is just further away from their pointer.

pluralmonad: I tell my friends and family to never click unsubscribe links, unless they had proactively subscribed. Buying something from a company that requires an email does not count. unsolicited marketing emails are spam and should be treated as such. Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com.

iamacyborg: > Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.comThat’s typically not a disguise but a clear means of indicating that you can reply to the email

ycombinatrix: How is it not a disguise? It means you can't block marketing emails without also blocking the legitimate support emails.

Arainach: Agreed. I was an early outlook.com user (was working at MS when it launched, I think internal users got slightly early access allowing me to claim a nicer name than my Gmail) but despite having well over a decade of accounts tied to it got so angry at certain messages never appearing that a couple of years ago I reversed the flow of forwarding and swapped to another account as my primary.Sounds like it's gotten even worse.

bigbuppo: The big three email providers block each other all the damn time. Independent mail systems have no help. Hell, Microsoft, in its infinite incompetence, will block itself.

cute_boi: microslop should start focusing on real world problem than overhyped ai bubble.

lousken: I was using outlook for communicating with businesses as it is often what they use. Some of them just could not send a response back to me, so I am not using outlook anymore. Just normal Microslop stuff

pluralmonad: No, sending marketing from support emails is almost certainly trying to game spam filters. Marketing@company.com would work for the allow replies purpose.

iamacyborg: > sending marketing from support emails is almost certainly trying to game spam filtersThat is not how spam filters work.

pluralmonad: If I've interacted with a specific email address, like support@company.com, my email provider will put them in my inbox.

ycombinatornews: Very happy I decided to ditch outlook (and did it) this year after 10+ years. Every other year some part of the system would break, deliverability, authentication or 2FA. More ads, less value.Eh. Another product driven into ground by Microslop

whalesalad: Days since last Microsoft fuckup: 0 (hard-coded)

crimsonnoodle58: We experienced this exact error this week. Only affected outlook.com users, and not 365 users. Had to supply MS support with proof of ownership of the IP. The whole process took about a week to resolve.

jonathanlydall: I always thought of outlook.com as a rebranding of Hotmail (which itself had been continually evolving, was probably actually “Live” at that point), I would expect it is the same (ever evolving) infrastructure.In which case, people like me with an @hotmail.com address from the 90’s were much earlier users of the outlook.com email boxes than when the domain was “launched” by Microsoft.

msxanadu: A question related to the outlook.com false spam mail problem... Why are incoming emails to outlook.com so large? 15KB minimum for a text email with just a title. Equivalent Gmail to/from Apple Mail is just a couple of KB.

jeroenhd: "Report spam" is quicker and easier than "unsubscribe".Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers, so it must be common enough to warrant Gmail developer attention.

sumtechguy: Pretty sure hotmail/outlook also has the same sort of popup for spam reports. I think accidental would be kind of hard with that popup.

tredre3: BTW your domain is missing SPF and DMARC records.

wccrawford: It feels like there's quite a lot of spin on this. There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected. It only really seems to mention Estonia, and probably only a region of it.The ISP there claims they haven't received any reports of SPAM. But that sounds wrong. No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.So putting that together, it seems like a small ISP screwed up and let spammers go wild, and Outlook blocked them for it. I can't really fault Outlook for that.

dqv: [delayed]

VladVladikoff: This has plagued us for years. We send quite a lot of transactional email (about 150k emails per day), and there have been several times where Microsoft blocked our server. Usually it is because Microsoft has banned an entire netblock, that our server just happens to be sitting in. I have seen them do this to IPs fro Hetzner, Linode, Amazon AWS (SES), etc. And yeah we've signed up for their junk mail reporting service, and we have all our DNS records dialed in perfectly.I even went as far as signing up for Azure, in the hopes that if I sent from a Microsoft IP it might not get blocked. But I didn't make it very far, every step of the way was like watching paint dry while the interface loaded or did something. Once I finally got the thing set up in order to send mail, the API was so molasses slow that it couldn't handle our mail throughput. Meaning it would take about 30 seconds to send each transactional email because of how slow their API is. Well that's only 2880 emails per day, that is not a reasonable send rate at all.I have even lost customers over this mess, it's really hard to explain to them that they can't receive our email because of their provider and not us. Especially when Microsoft has the audacity to return: 250 OK Email Queued (but then not deliver it anyway!)If anyone has any solutions to this mess I am all ears!

tokyobreakfast: It's almost certainly because your customers are reporting your emails as spam by moving it into the junk folder which is training their systems.Once enough of your customers do this to cross a certain threshold, you are identified as an undesirable sender and QED.

dijit: It happens at scale.There's like a middle scale where you're not big enough that Microsoft will go out of their way to whitelist you, but you're big enough that your "send to junk" rate is just high in terms of absolute numbers.It's certainly not a ratio, it must be based on absolute numbers because I've seen it too many times across too many companies, and the only ones that get away with it are extremely low volume.Once you have 1,000,000 mails, even a 0.1% mark as spam rate is 1,000 emails. - and some people treat mark as spam as their delete button, certainly more than 0.1% of people. Don't ask me why.EDIT: on inspection; it's worth noting the mechanism is even more insidious than "people mark you as spam". Microsoft also weighs delete-without-opening as a negative signal. So if you're sending transactional mail (receipts, shipping notifications, invoices) and your users get exactly what they wanted, feel satisfied, and bin it without opening. You've just taken a reputation hit for doing your job correctly. The senders most at risk aren't the ones sending rubbish.EDIT2; theres a reply to me that I can’t reply to because its [dead]; though the point is valid so I vouched. To them I say: I agree. But you probably want your receipt, and thats the example I gave (for a reason).

LorenPechtel: Delete without opening shouldn't be treated as negative. I generally keep the stuff on your list, but I almost never open the it's-your-turn e-mails--the title contains everything I need to know. And, likewise, Meetup notifications--I dump most of them unread as the title is enough to tell me I'm not interested in that event.

bluecalm: Almost certainly not. Microsoft was the only email provider we had problems with a few years back. We only sent emails to people who paid us several hundred USD to send that email. We didn't sent anything else - no follow ups, marketing, announcements, nothing.

LorenPechtel: I'm thinking perhaps they turned on some idiot AI. And they don't want to back down and admit they did it wrong.

justinclift: > ... some people treat mark as spam as their delete button, certainly more than 0.1% of people. Don't ask me why.If a business sends mail that I've not previously indicated I'm ok with them sending (newsletters out of the blue, unasked for "summary of stuff you've missed" emails, etc), then it's spam and will be treated as such.

vladvasiliu: > it's an easy way to motivate people to having a Microsoft account.Can you actually use a non-outlook account for windows? Or are you talking about a different kind of "ms account"?

zinekeller: You can register a (personal, not M365) Microsoft Account without Outlook.com by just supplying a different email address in the signup portion.Also you can have (or was that had - not sure) a (again personal, not Workspace) Google account without Gmail by using a different email address.

aclindsa: Funny, my email server started being blocked on Feb. 23. I assumed it was just me, but maybe they block a bunch of people all at once?

GCUMstlyHarmls: > and some people treat mark as spam as their delete button, certainly more than 0.1% of people. Don't ask me why.The delete button is for saving important stuff, not spam.https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/jndew2/users_who_...https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1sac4...https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1eun2...I recall seeing this was some kind of learned behavior from lotus notes, deleted items wouldn't count in your quota, so users would keep stuff in there.

Alifatisk: I created my first Outlook account when I was young. Now, 30 years later and its still my primary account. I can't imagine how I would migrate to another email address if Microslop would begin ruining Outlook by forced subscription or something. My digital life is in M$ hands at the moment.

jraph: Act now.- create a new email address somewhere else, preferably with your own domain- redirect all your emails to your new account- send an auto reply: "I don't use this email address anymore, and I may not see this email. My new address is XXX"The third point is a lie that nudges people into updating their addressnook a lot faster. If you just silently redirect they might not even notice. But you can explain in a sentence why you are doing this.This redirect+auto reply can be left in place forever.

vintermann: Thing is, unsubscribe links are often an "inform spammers that this mail address is in use" link. Even the ones Gmail offers up.If I didn't click their button to subscribe, I'm not clicking their button to unsubscribe. Who's to say they won't just "sign me up" again after a while? In fact I know several large US corporations which routinely sign you up for notifications again after a few months.

jeroenhd: If you didn't click the button, then of course, you don't send the unsubscribe message.If you did subscribe to a newsletter and no longer want to receive it (which is the majority of these cases), then the unsubscribe action is the logical thing to do.

Ensorceled: > If you did subscribe to a newsletter and no longer want to receive it (which is the majority of these cases), then the unsubscribe action is the logical thing to do.Not the second time :-)

Bender: Adding that ideally one would only auto-replay to people in their address book at the time so one is not replying to spammers.

whalesalad: I got 99 problems but mail delivery ain’t one

Bombthecat: Send paper to those customers:)

g8oz: Not surprised. Confirmation emails from numerous services have been been unable to get through for me.

wolvoleo: They also block people who send very little mail. If you only send one or two per month to their consumer domains you don't build enough 'reputation'.I know for a fact my mail server never sent any spam because I logged everything. It was only me using it. But every few months I got banned from sending to live.com. I have one friend there. They didn't mark anything as spam. We just sent personal emails.There's a form where you can unban it but it kept happening. In the end I stopped running my own, it was so much hassle.

zelphirkalt: It is my experience, that Outlook is not a reliable e-mail service. Sometimes e-mails are not delivered, or only delivered hours later. When they are delivered, even as a paying customer, they are downloaded so slowly, that I had to wait 10 minutes to get all my e-mails, while my 1 EUR per month Posteo provider delivers in seconds.My impression is, that the only reason one would want to have MS as a mail provider is, that they are entrenched in the e-mail provider reputation and delivery game. Other than that, it seems to be an all around bad service. Not even talking about the mail client itself.

SoftTalker: The big reason is enterprises buy into O365 and running their email through Outlook instead of on-prem or at another provider is part of that. For the same reason they use Teams over Zoom or Slack or other alternatives.

azalemeth: Exactly. Nobody chooses MS for quality, and those who do choose it are never those who suffer the most for its own decisions.

wolvoleo: Yup. It's really the cheapest not the best. And Microsoft sell directly to our C suite who have white glove IT support that do everything for them so they never see any issues.The old saying of "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you are" is certainly true though. Unfortunately.