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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.
Mountains out of mole hiles. It's just a spam filter blocking bot mail.
Quality over Quantity.http://www.virusgaming.com/
I invited someone with a hotmail address about a week ago, and they accepted with no problem. So unless they've suddenly changed their policy after the first several thousand invites went out, this is an isolated email problem reported on one person's weblog. Spam filters moving the invite into a bulk mail folder is to be expected - it is an automatically generated email sent out in bulk, after all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I tried that. Yes, I have my own SMTP server. It was nice, fast, and super reliable until AOL/Comcast/Time Warner/pretty much everyone began blocking email from everyone except megacorp SMTP servers.
12:50 - press return.
Wait a minute. You said it was in your bulk folder. Then you start talking about spam. But Hotmail didn't call it spam.
The invite was certainly bulk. It arrived as a part of a large number of substantively identical email messages. Like with posts to properly run mailing lists and other legitimate bulk email, your invite was solicited, so your copy wasn't spam.
Note that bulkiness is measurable. Simply count messages that match fuzzy checksums.
Spamminess, on the other hand, is far harder to measure, as it depends on the users' sometimes erroneous recollections of whether they solicited the bulk messages.
But Hotmail didn't call it spam. They called it bulk. That sounds quite proper and accurate to me.
Everyone has a real e-mail account available to them if they just pay enough attention to know who's offering it (real ISP, college, job) and learn how to set up a real e-mail client. Five minutes.
Real ISPs come and go, you are not in college forever, and you dont keep the same job forever. However, you CAN keep one of these "second-rate" email addresses indefinitely. I have had my yahoo account for years, while friends and colleagues change their "real" email accounts year after year, mine has always been the same. I have lost touch with many people because they changed email addresses and never told anyone.
Thanks for the short-sighted answer.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
Privacy concerns? That's such hogwash. GMail's server reads your email and offers syntactical ads. If it didn't offer the ads, GMail's server would still read your email. So would ever server between the sender AND GMail. Machines read your email all the time. If they didn't, you wouldn't be able to get it. You certainly wouldn't be able to have it checked for spam. Thinking your message is "private" just because the machines don't explicitly tell you they read it is very naive.
Methinks ISPs are using "Privacy Concerns" as a way of keeping customers from leaving their quickly aging service. "Hey look, bearded technology pundits with nothing better to do are upset about ads in a radical new free email service. They're waving the privacy flag. We can wave the same flag and lock people in to viewing our contextually inaccurate ads a little bit longer!"
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Actually, the real solution is to take $50 or so and invest in your own domain name and domain based email hosting with a reputable company. By controlling the DOMAIN your email goes to, you have complete control over your email address. If your company goes under, you can move to another one in about 2 days. If your domain provider goes under, you can move your Domain to a new one in about a week. And best of all, you can offer free email accounts to all of your friends and family...free email accounts that you can vouch for, that don't pop up ads everywhere, and that you can control who reads/knows about their existance.
I started my hosting company as a cooperative just so I could get rid of my favorite email "alias," dasmegabyte@mindless.com, which the company providing the alias had sold to spammers when I told them no, I won't give you $10 a month to forward my fucking email with ads at the bottom. Incidentally, I lost a job in 2001 because the hiring staff sent an email to dasmegabyte@mindless.com and I had already dropped that account -- there was too much spam to sort through.
Hey freaks: now you're ju