Most sites I visit block hotmail. It's a shame but if Microsoft won't do anything to correct it, there's not much you can do. There's plenty of other free web email hosts out there which are a boatload better than hotmail (i.e. gmail ).

Here are the top 12 free email services as recommended by About.com... just ignore #7! ;) http://email.about.com/od/freeemailreviews/tp/free_email.htm

Make sure the SMTP host actually SENDING the mail can be resolved in DNS both ways, forward and reverse. If your mail host cannot has no PTR record that will score you as a spamhost REALLY HIGH. This could have got overlooked when you moved your datacenter.

I disagree with the policy of boycotting Hotmail. It's one thing to be inconvenienced by Micro$oft and an entirely different thing to inconvenience your own end users because of your frustrations -- it seems childish IMO. This policy hasn't improved the situation I'm sure, but it has succeeded in passing your frustrations on to me directly.

I suggest that instead of lashing out at Hotmail like this (which I guarantee won't hurt their feelings one bit), warn your users that Hotmail's poorly-tuned spam filters consider MMO Guildsite's emails to be spam and thus expect it to show up in their spam folder. Perhaps add that they should also complain to M$ about this issue (since they're far more likely to listen to their own users as opposed to you).

After all, if their spam filter uses machine learning, then someone is supervising that learning process which is most likely the Hotmail end user when they mark something as not being spam. Therefore boycotting Hotmail prevents users from receiving an email at all which prevents you from obtaining non-spam status altogether.

Hi Goodgrief,

Thank you for your feedback on this issue.

We tried for several weeks to come up with a solution or workaround to the issue, and did not wish to block hotmail, as it is a popular email provider and many of our existing members are using it.

But after receiving the email from Microsoft saying they could not provide us with any assistance, we did not feel we had many other options.

We rely on email to be able to communicate with our users, and to send out emails for guild acceptance, password resets, account and site creation, etc; if these emails are not properly delivered it can cause problems for users and site owners.

Microsofts SmartScreen filter does not simply flag the email as spam and place it in the spam folder, as would be expected, instead it is blocked and not delivered to the user; normally email servers notify the sender if email could not be sent, but Microsofts SmartScreen does not do this and fails to notify us that email has not been delivered, which means we cannot detect a problem with email being blocked unless a user raises the issue to us.

Even if we were able to find a way to work around the issue and have our emails delivered now through hotmail, there is no guarantee we would not suddenly find our emails blocked again in the future; we do not send out any spam from our email server, and suddenly found our emails not being delivered to hotmail addresses; we have no way to determine why this happened, and no way to prevent it from happening in the future, so unfortunately not allowing hotmail seems to be the only option.