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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.
I would expect this from Microsoft. They can blame the spam filters, to try and save face, but the simple fact is, they are simply taking a page from their own rulebook; they don't want to lose advertising revenue from people switching to Gmail, so they are breaking the law and interfering with email. If Microsoft had successfully bought Google to trash it, Gmail would not have existed at all. For those of you just tuning in, Hotmail is owned and operated by Microsoft, after they bought the service in 1998. I was a Hotmail member prior to Microsoft being involved and the service has declined significantly since the old days. Although many of the features have improved since then, the bulk of the Hotmail service is becoming increasingly unreliable for email that just "has to get there".
In other news, we've got lots of Gmail invites for military folks here, so if you want Gmail for large files and you are a soldier, or if you want to donate your invites to soldiers, check us out. This is not just for American military, but any democratic military, such as Canada or the UK.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Mega-corporations don't play nice? Really? I'm absolutely flabbergasted!
An email service blocking emails from a competing email service is surprising. Has this ever happened before? Is this even legal?
Little Bricklets
But this was such a well researched posting. I like how it contradicts itself:
Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce...invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced
...by spam bayes outlook plugin, almost missed the three week window too, so yeah, it does look very spammy.
I am NaN
Well, this is old news first reported the middle of last week. Perhaps they fixed it now and configured their spam filters to allow the Gmail invite.
Bought a dirt-cheap account on Ebay on Saturday; the seller sent the link to my Hotmail account, and it never appeared in the inbox or the trash.
Had him send it to my main email address after reading this article, and the link worked fine. Needless to say, I'll be ditching Hotmail within 24 hours. This makes me incredibly angry.
http://www.farmerbob.org
Overgeneralization has made it into /. stories before, or have you not been around that long? If you simply RTFA, you'll see that it's mainly just the invites that have gone missing.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
> I don't understand why ISPs would block...
Hotmail and Yahoo! are not ISPs. They're a couple of second-rate e-mail services. This is yet another reason everyone should steer clear of "free" e-mail altogether.
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.
How does gmail's indexing of email stored on gmail servers affect mail coming in to an ISP? "Privacy" my arse. I trust google to tread my data properly more than I do most ISPs anyway. :)
Just sent a couple e-mails from my gmail account to my hotmail account. The first one was delayed a few minutes, but the second one went through instantaneously. My friend (who originally invited me) says she successfully invited someone using a hotmail address yesterday.
So, yeah. I'm afraid this is... not true. At least as far as hotmail is concerned.
I do not know if this is the exact case. I tried the test as described with Yahoo. I copied the entire body of the gmail invite and send that to my yahoo account with any subject, and it gets marked as spam. I can delete up to one word in the email, and it does not get marked as spam. It seems Yahoo is specifically looking for the whole body of the Gmail invite..
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.
But paid-for doesn't always mean better. I'm on NTL, and in the last year the email service has become unuseable (emails sometimes take months to arrive, or sometimes disappear altogether; sometimes connecting to POP or SMTP is very difficult). Paid-for doesn't mean you have more of a position to complain, when your complaints are completely ignored. Whilst gmail blocking seems to be restricted to free email accounts, it is not inconceivable that paid for ISPs may try dirty tactics.
Switching to a free email account (that I still use a "real email client" for) took five minutes, but switching entirely to a new cable ISP would take far longer.
Sweet! They both came through, the one sent to Yahoo was stuck in my Bulk folder, and the one to Hotmail was in my inbox (I use the "enhanced" junk mail filtering). This post is BUSTED. -Mike
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.
This is true. But, what probably triggered it was this: A few users received Gmail invites and either didn't know what it was, or didn't recognize the person they received it from, saw it was offering another email service, then clicked the button that says "This is Spam". When Hotmail gets a few reports like that the message text gets added to their filters and everyone else's invites start going to the Spam folder.
That's just standard operating procedure. If they didn't have that procedure in place we'd receive 50-100 spams a day in our Hotmail box.
Of course, none of this would have been a problem if Hotmail hadn't sold all of their account lists to bulk emailers years ago. Hotmail is the only service that when I first created an account, instantly started sending me spam before I had even given my address out to anyone. The only way they could have gotten my address is if Hotmail sold it to bulk senders.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon