Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail Blocks Gmail Emails (and Invites)
bonhomme_de_neige writes "Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce, but nor do they arrive in the recipient's Inbox - they vanish mysteriously into the aether. Joel Johnson writes in his Gizmodo weblog that invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced (this even received coverage from ZDNet). Search Engine Roundtable writes that several ISPs are blocking Gmail. It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking." Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another.
I got an invite from my buddy, he even sent it to me using his gmail address. me thinks this story is FUD.
So the core of this Slashdot "article" is some posting on one guy's blog about losing a invitation he sent to his girlfriend. And that's been extrapolated into "Hotmail blocks Gmail".
If you read the blog article the writer blows all credibility when he reveals that someone just told him about the "Sent Folder":
Update: Thanks to everyone telling me to check the Sent folder. I can at least retrieve the invites now.
When are people going to realize that blogs are the equivalent of public urination on the web. People post stream of consciousness bullshit dressed up as "information" or even "facts" and because it's on a blog, well then, it must be true.
John.
It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking.
Much as I enjoy wearing my tinfoil hat, I think it can be dispensed with here.
Both Hotmail and Yahoo mail have been plagued with spam, and with users demanding they do something about that spam. Indeed, that's one reason people are interested in GMail.
Since almost all spam -- anything we think of spam, anyway -- arrives in mass quantities, and a logical way to reduce spam is simply to look for many addresses receiving the same email.
So a decent first cut at filtering bulk spam (and recall that both Yahoo and Hotmail use "bulk mail" folders) would be to take an MD5 sum of each email (not including the "To" address header lines, of course), stick the sum in hash table or other database, and increment a counter for each email with that MD5 sum. Once the counter reached some arbitrary large-ish number, you'd mark all copies of that emails spam.
Since the GMial invite varies slightly, it's clear that something fuzzier than an MD5 sum is being used, but the principle remains the same.
The first N GMail invites weren't marked as "bulk email"; after the counter threshold was reached, all the rest have been.
So all we've learned from this is that, even during this invite-only beta test, GMail must be sending out a hell of a lot of invites, and that, yes indeed, Hotmail and Yahoo customers demanded and got "bulk email" filtering.
So take off the tinfoil hats -- you'll have a real reason to wear them soon enough.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I received a Gmail invite through my hotmail account just yesterday without any problems.
Actually - it happened in this order. Test email sent to Hotmail, did not arrive. Story submitted to Slashdot. Email arrived in Hotmail account several hours later (after other emails I sent from my other accounts _after_ the one from gmail - which arrived almost instantly). I've read several reports of Hotmail both bouncing and vanishing Gmail email - I'm sure if you hunt around you can find even more. It may be that they are changing their behaviour as they realise it'd going to do them more harm then good.
As for the Yahoo one, that is definitely true.
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
unless your ISP is SBC, then you get a Yahoo! account (even though its @sbcglobal.net).