[HN Gopher] Emails to Outlook.com rejected due to a fault or ove...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Emails to Outlook.com rejected due to a fault or overzealous
       blocking rules
        
       Author : Bender
       Score  : 128 points
       Date   : 2026-03-04 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | TonyTrapp wrote:
       | I've had this exact problem for years. My IP addresses have been
       | used for 15+ years for sending e-mail, they are spam-free, but
       | Microsoft keeps blocking them. Every two months or so I have to
       | ask them to unblock the IP again, then I can send mails to
       | Outlook again, until they just random decide to block me again.
       | It's an absolute clown show.
        
         | lucasfin000 wrote:
         | This is the price every small sender pays. The unblock request
         | process is essentially designed to make you give up or move to
         | a large ESP. There's no appeals process, no SLA, no
         | acknowledgment that your reputation data might just be wrong.
         | You're at the mercy of a system that treats false positives as
         | acceptable damage.
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | eviks wrote:
         | You could start the process now, before the ruin?
        
         | butILoveLife wrote:
         | I learned this lesson the hard way with OneDrive.
         | 
         | Now I only use Windows for legacy software that my customers
         | force on me.
         | 
         | Fedora has not just been liberating, but jaw dropping. I
         | actually felt offended that I had wasted so much time on
         | debian-family/ubuntu/mint and windows.
        
           | BLKNSLVR wrote:
           | OneDrive was born enshittified.
           | 
           | The concept, way back when, was great. I tried to use it, by
           | a previous name, for replicating / distributing data backups
           | and it always worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks.
           | And then something unrecoverable went wrong, and I had to re-
           | set it up essentially from scratch and it worked great... for
           | a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable
           | went wrong.
           | 
           | In the intervening 15+ years, OneDrive has never made my
           | experience of computing better. It has only ever nagged,
           | slowed, and failed. And that was before Microslop went down
           | the x% AI coding path.
        
             | pluralmonad wrote:
             | I personally like when you open any office doc, do nothing
             | to it before closing and you get the scary warning asking
             | if you want to save your document (to onedrive) implying
             | all is lost if you select no. I am sure millions of tech
             | unsavvy people have been conned into sending their data to
             | Bill Gates.
        
         | nicbou wrote:
         | I would start migrating to an email domain that you control. It
         | will come useful at one point or another.
        
           | josephg wrote:
           | Yep this. I migrated from Gmail to my own domain years ago.
           | It was painful. Weirdly enough, I think the longest holdouts
           | were my parents, who were still sending email to my Gmail
           | account a decade after I stopped using the address.
           | 
           | I moved my email to Fastmail, and I've been very happy ever
           | since. But now that I own the domain, moving to a different
           | provider - if I ever need to - would be trivial.
        
             | ohyoutravel wrote:
             | I moved to Fastmail, set it up with Gmail so I received
             | forwarded emails. Years later there's still a long tail of
             | senders using my Gmail, but I get the emails forwarded, and
             | only actually log in to Gmail every six months or so.
        
       | wccrawford wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | shevy-java wrote:
         | > There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected.
         | 
         | How many users would you see as the threshold then?
         | 
         | Since you stated that there is a spin to this, how many users
         | would go over your defined threshold level?
        
         | cromulent wrote:
         | The article has hyperlinks in it, e.g. to this:
         | 
         | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5786144/...
         | 
         | which comes from an ESP serving millions of users.
        
         | thedanbob wrote:
         | My org (USA) was affected. I wasn't the primary person dealing
         | with it, but from what I gather one user marked one of our
         | emails as junk, and then suddenly all of our emails to Outlook
         | users started getting blocked.
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | Someone recently leveraged some kind of automated spam attack
         | against my domain using Zendesk's email servers. For some
         | reason, Zendesk doesn't enforce SPF and DKIM checks when
         | opening new tickets, so I got flooded with "your new account
         | has been registered" and "thank you for filing a ticket"
         | emails.
         | 
         | I blocked off Zendesk entirely because they didn't fix their
         | shitty email system. The other newsletter mail services
         | (mailgun/sendgrid/etc.) are just as bad for this.
         | 
         | There are plenty of reasons why large email senders could (and
         | should) be on reputation blacklists. None of these email
         | delivery companies seem to care very much about the spam they
         | send until shit hits the fan, and now that it did it seems
         | everyone blames the people maintaining the blacklists.
        
           | jamespo wrote:
           | This was widespread, I was also affected. I think you can
           | create spoof tickets / accounts over Https with no
           | verification and zendesk don't want to do anything which adds
           | friction.
        
         | shiftpgdn wrote:
         | This is an extremely widespread issue. I send close to a
         | million emails per month across dozens of different providers
         | (all newsletters.) These are all from high reputation domains
         | and email accounts. We are completely unable to make anything
         | happen with Microslop. It is infuriating.
        
         | dqv wrote:
         | Your intuition is way off, like dangerously off. But your
         | comment is a great example to show a smug lawyer at Microsoft
         | when they try to say there is no basis for the claim that these
         | blocks against legitimate senders are defamatory.
         | 
         | This has been affecting reputable senders who take spam
         | reporting seriously, including MXRoute and Discourse.
         | 
         | > No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.
         | 
         | "No reports" can mean a lot of things. There is no "probably".
         | 
         | The "you" in "your" is Microsoft because under a certain volume
         | of email, they don't even send reports. I regularly test the
         | abuse contact address for my server because of this exact
         | unfair assumption - that it must be my fault. I have never once
         | gotten an abuse report notification from Microsoft, but I have
         | gotten a bounce message saying that I'm blocked because I
         | apparently send spam! Btw, this was _in reply to an email from
         | a Microsoft user_.
         | 
         | Worse, I figured I'd just disallow any email from a Microsoft
         | property - if an outlook (or hotmail or live or anyone else)
         | sends an email, I can just bounce it and tell them to use a
         | different service to reach me since I can't reply. Nope!
         | Microsoft won't surface the bounce message to the user.
         | 
         | So, I am barred from replying to Microsoft emails. I am also
         | barred from informing the sender that their email won't reach
         | me.
         | 
         | It's defamation - the sender is always going to assume that it
         | is my fault if I didn't reply even if the reason I "didn't
         | reply" is outside of my control.
         | 
         | > 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.
         | 
         | Yes, in your imagined scenario, you can't really fault outlook.
         | In the real world, however, outlook is very much to blame.
        
         | chao- wrote:
         | One IP address (exclusively ours) among our email IPs at my
         | place of employment was affected. We have used that IP for nine
         | years. Emails are strictly transactional (receipts, password
         | resets, et cetera).
         | 
         | The "rate limiting" started two weeks ago, giving us a code
         | that Microsoft's documentation doesn't even list. It remains
         | unresolved. Never had critical issues like this on our
         | transactional IPs prior to this, and this particular IP address
         | is still delivering just fine to other consumer and corporate
         | email systems.
        
       | gzread wrote:
       | Everyone who runs an email server knows Microslop doesn't care
       | about receiving its customer's emails. The best thing you can do
       | is migrate away.
        
         | miohtama wrote:
         | No worries. If you migrate your email server to Azure(TM) the
         | delivery is guaranteed.
        
         | kijin wrote:
         | Keep a few throwaway Hotmail/Outlook addresses in your password
         | manager, in case you need to use a Windows PC that demands a
         | Microslop account. That's about the end of their usefulness.
         | 
         | Just like Internet Explorer used to be the program you used
         | once -- and only once -- to download a proper browser.
        
       | mono442 wrote:
       | It's has been like this for a long time. For me hotmail is
       | unusable because some emails just never arrive due to their spam
       | filtering.
        
       | dismalpedigree wrote:
       | I'm guessing they connected CoPilot to the inbound filter and it
       | is doing stupid and unexpected things.
        
       | mmsc wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ohyoutravel wrote:
         | They wiped all the emails from my 25 year old Hotmail account.
         | Pretty weak. I refuse to use Microsoft products except if
         | forced, and do my best to evangelize this position.
        
           | expedition32 wrote:
           | Most people will never pay for email service. Which leaves
           | you Google, MS or god forbid your own ISP.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I wonder how many accounts on other services were then hijacked
         | using "forgot my password" attacks.
         | 
         | UPDATE: After a bit of digging it looks like they started the
         | username recycling policy in 2013, may have quietly stopped
         | doing that in 2018 but formalized no longer doing that in 2021:
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20230627104616/https://www.micro...
         | 
         | "Summary of changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement - June
         | 15, 2021 [...] In the Outlook and Office Services sections,
         | we've removed the Outlook.com section to clarify that an email
         | address or username is not recycled into our system or assigned
         | to another user."
        
           | deltoidmaximus wrote:
           | It's wild to me they ever started doing this in the first
           | place. And in 2013 no less, it isn't like the hijacking risk
           | was some far off concept at that point.
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | > _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".
        
           | vladvasiliu wrote:
           | > 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"?
        
       | arend321 wrote:
       | I'm in the privileged position to advise clients to move away
       | from hotmail/live if they want uninterrupted email delivery.
        
       | joshstrange wrote:
       | Just had a friend reach out yesterday about this issue. His
       | outlook account for 10+ years started having issues receiving
       | emails from his dad and a company he works with.
       | 
       | All I could find was that his dad's email was missing SPF/DMARC
       | but the other email address that was having problems looked like
       | it was configured correctly.
       | 
       | I only was able to get a screenshot of the email voice his dad
       | received and it mentioned being on a block list (like in the
       | article).
        
       | boesboes wrote:
       | I've stopped diagnosing outlook/hotmail/live delivery issues
       | about 12 years go, they simply do not give a single fuck about
       | their customers. It used to be different, about 18 years ago
       | orso, they had ways to contact them and resolve such issue.
       | 
       | fuck big tech :)
        
       | Ensorceled wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | > Double so if that company sends marketing emails
             | disguised behind support@company.com
             | 
             | That's typically not a disguise but a clear means of
             | indicating that you can reply to the email
        
               | pluralmonad wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | > sending marketing from support emails is almost
               | certainly trying to game spam filters
               | 
               | That is not how spam filters work.
        
               | pluralmonad wrote:
               | If I've interacted with a specific email address, like
               | support@company.com, my email provider will put them in
               | my inbox.
        
               | ycombinatrix wrote:
               | How is it not a disguise? It means you can't block
               | marketing emails without also blocking the legitimate
               | support emails.
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | "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.
        
             | Ensorceled wrote:
             | > Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to
             | unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate
             | unsubscribe headers
             | 
             | Unfortunately close to 100% of the spam I'm flagging causes
             | this popup now :-/
             | 
             | I'm getting a dozen spam a day now on my Gmail account ...
             | I think they're losing the battle.
        
             | SoftTalker wrote:
             | Does gmail still insert ads in the free tier? That would be
             | a reason to keep people reading as many emails as possible.
        
             | sumtechguy wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | Arainach wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | jonathanlydall wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | Markoff wrote:
       | As long term Outlook.com user all I can say it's their service is
       | extremely unreliable, my emails are either not delivered at all
       | or end up in junk mail, some emails I don't receive at all or my
       | partners are rate limited sometimes receiving their emails with
       | hours long delays.
       | 
       | I assume also their junk filters block some emails and there is
       | no way to avoid it, you repeatedly add senders to safe senders
       | list, even to safe subscriptions and their email still end up
       | marked as junk even after years long communication from same
       | addresses.
       | 
       | As backup when something important I write email to recipient
       | from gmail whether they received my email from outlook only to
       | find out my email was never received.
        
       | gus_massa wrote:
       | A few years ago, in my university we have a big problem at the
       | beginning of the semester to contact ~10K students, in particular
       | when they register to our Moodle platform and the server sends
       | them a message.
       | 
       | Gmail was usually ok.
       | 
       | Yahoo had some max messages per day.
       | 
       | But Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever just made the messages
       | disappear, no spam folder, no bounce, just disappear. We had some
       | success telling the students to send us a message from their
       | Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever address half an hour before
       | registration. This adds our address to some special secret list
       | for that account, and our later messages (usually) reach them.
       | (It may fail. It may fail. IWOMM. YMMV.)
        
       | CrzyLngPwd wrote:
       | It's not just Outlook, it's all MS email products as well as
       | Yahoo.
       | 
       | These are emails that our customers have specifically requested
       | and we get support tickets blaming us.
       | 
       | It's been like this for years.
        
       | iamcalledrob wrote:
       | 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
        
         | spogbiper wrote:
         | outlook.com and Office 365 are very different beasts. with the
         | latter problems are more often something (mis)configured by the
         | customer/administrator of the 365 account rather than microsoft
         | themselves, and there are steps the customer can take to work
         | around the issue. With outlook.com there is nothing the
         | recipient can do.
        
       | rbc wrote:
       | This is one of those articles that demonstrates why email should
       | be distributed. Letting Google and Microsoft run email for the
       | planet is just asking for problems. There are some technical
       | demands to running email services, but they are still in reach of
       | the technically inclined individual or organization. If for no
       | other reason, it would help keep the big mail service providers
       | honest.
        
       | cute_boi wrote:
       | microslop should start focusing on real world problem than
       | overhyped ai bubble.
        
       | zelphirkalt wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | lousken wrote:
       | 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
        
       | bradleyy wrote:
       | Having to explain to customers that they didn't receive an email
       | because Outlook has a multi-stage set of email servers and the
       | inside ones reject due to the edge (antispam) servers is always
       | interesting.
        
       | ycombinatornews wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | Days since last Microsoft fuckup: 0 (hard-coded)
        
         | tredre3 wrote:
         | BTW your domain is missing SPF and DMARC records.
        
       | crimsonnoodle58 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | VladVladikoff wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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).
        
             | andrewmcwatters wrote:
             | Because everyone and their mother sends spam. It doesn't
             | take a genius to figure out why. No, I don't want emails
             | about the new product you're releasing. No I don't want
             | your newsletter.
             | 
             | I have to actively fight to keep my inbox empty, and free
             | of crap. And while I'm ranting, notifications I actually
             | want on my phone are co-opted by advertisements, which
             | Apple and Google should actively prevent, but they won't
             | because they use push notifications to commingle
             | advertising to you with important, sometimes time-sensitive
             | notifications.
             | 
             | Everyone thinks they have something worth sharing. Over
             | three nines of the time, people don't. I will happily be
             | apart of the 0.1% who sends your crap straight to the spam
             | filter for Gmail to train.
             | 
             | It's spam. It's almost all spam. Even the transactional
             | stuff for logging in, I don't want. Just use an email,
             | password, and TOTP. Stop sending me emails.
             | 
             | Stop it.
        
             | LorenPechtel wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | adrian_b wrote:
           | I do not think that is true.
           | 
           | Once when this happened to me a couple of years ago, it was
           | the opposite.
           | 
           | My e-mails were put by default by Microsoft as spam into the
           | junk folder, without the customer knowing anything about
           | this.
           | 
           | After I succeeded to notify him about this, he searched there
           | the e-mails and marked them as "not spam", and then he
           | received my following e-mails.
           | 
           | So initially the customer did nothing and was not aware that
           | some of the e-mails sent to him are classified as spam, and
           | he had to do active efforts to override this default action
           | by Microsoft.
           | 
           | There was absolutely nothing suspicious about the e-mail
           | messages classified as spam in their content, their only
           | fault was not coming from one of the few major e-mail
           | providers.
        
           | bluecalm wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | throwaway613746 wrote:
       | My company has been massively affected by this over the past
       | month.
       | 
       | It sucks having to tell customers "this is on Microsoft's end,
       | we're trying to work through it with them but we don't have an
       | ETA and can't say more than that" because Microsoft support is
       | absolutely useless. The other day we changed some DMARC/SPF
       | records around and that seemed to do the trick but now it appears
       | to just be a coincidence.
        
       | msxanadu wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | elcritch wrote:
       | For these large services it seems that small companies should be
       | allowed to sue them.
       | 
       | Otherwise there's no incentive for the big providers to care.
       | 
       | Similarly for anti-virus. It's a PITA when Windows or Mac falsely
       | flag a program as a virus when it's not in their app stores.
        
         | dqv wrote:
         | Yes, at least in the US, being a litigious freak gets results.
         | 
         | Weird trick to get unblocked: follow the standard three-email
         | procedure to sender support, then send a fourth email ccing
         | buscond@microsoft.com telling them to unblock or next step is
         | attorney general.
         | 
         | The thing about a lot of attorney generals is they LOVE to
         | smack down a big corporation like Microsoft for the little guy.
        
       | LorenPechtel wrote:
       | I'm thinking perhaps they turned on some idiot AI. And they don't
       | want to back down and admit they did it wrong.
        
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