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]