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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.
Mega-corporations don't play nice? Really? I'm absolutely flabbergasted!
Stop corporate
Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another.
;)
But I won't let that stop me from posting it!
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.
Hotmail is still not as efficient at blocking Gmail as Internet Explorer is efficient at unblocking pop-ups.
Mountains out of mole hiles. It's just a spam filter blocking bot mail.
Quality over Quantity.http://www.virusgaming.com/
I just tested to three hotmail accounts, invites and standard emails get through fine. Not sure about yahoo tho.
I've invited two people on their Hotmail accounts, and both received the emails just fine.
"I'm not sure which is the bigger disappointment; my failure to formulate a unified field theory, or you."--Stephen Haw
... if I were a spam filter, I would have seen the gmail email as spam too... I mean LOOK at it.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another.
Are the editors finally trying to verify things around here?
If that's the case, I commend them.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
So thats why my G-mail invite never showed up!!
I got an invite from my buddy, he even sent it to me using his gmail address. me thinks this story is FUD.
To test, I sent two messages from GMail: one directly to my Hotmail account and one which I only CC'ed to my Hotmail account. The CC'd message arrived immediately but the direct message (sent first) arrived about 5 minutes later.
I have an hotmail account, and my cousin was able to send me a Gmail invite to that account a week ago. Perhaps the situation changed, I don't know.
Please direct all bug reports to
Just sent my hotmail account a mail from my gmail account. The message didn't bounce and arrived in my hotmail account just fine.
So at least hotmail isn't using dirty tactics.
Hate me!
It looks like Hotmail staff finelly discovered procmail and /dev/null.
It's possible that the blocking is happening because of some poor sap's unfortunate legal name. He might actually be named "Instant Winner", or "Free Vacation". Crazy hippies.
stuff |
After reading most of these links (I know.. I actually RTFA), these blogs and other articles were posted months ago (back in April!). Perhaps they have since changed their ways after numerous postings about it?
Hmmm.
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.
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.
Not that I would put it beyond Microsoft to block a competitor, but if you RTFA you see that a possible reason for the invites being bounced is that they are being picked up by the spam filters.
k in g-gmail-invitations-015942.php
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/is-hotmail-bloc
Sorry but this came right out the box of Microsoft's dirty tricks. If you can't get your e-mail then you can't switch services, microsoft already has to deal with Linux, why not shut out Gmail while we're at it? At least this time it won't cost a small company millions because Microsoft didn't like them. I just wonder how many people will sue when they lose money through Ebay when buying one and it never arriving.
I like muppets.
...by spam bayes outlook plugin, almost missed the three week window too, so yeah, it does look very spammy.
I am NaN
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or in other words, you are practicing the old time honoured passtime of spreading a rumour.
Great work.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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 had an invite sent to my Hotmail address yesterday, and it arrived safely in my inbox within seconds. However, a message I sent from my Gmail account to somebody else's Hotmail went into their 'Junk Mail' folder.
Either way, I'm sure Microsoft will rectify this situation, or risk losing customers.
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.
A Gmail invite came to my Yahoo account just fine.
Just so y'all know: I used http://www.gmailswap.com to get the invite. Thanks guys!
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Very funny in a warped sort of way. If email begins to fail regularly, this may be the straw that brings in full goverment regulation and all the blessings and other stuff that entails...
Remember at the dawn of the electrical age there were competing companies with many different voltages, made for exciting interoperability issues. Goverment regulation could be a blessing.
Other companies as Outblaze have similar practices. Recently, all emails from the un.org servers were BLOCKED. Outblaze claim that the sysadmin @ un.org blocked their servers for spam or other stuff (viruses, etc) and did not respond to their emails. What Outblaze did is the most stupid thing ever. I will not be renewing my subscription with them (www.operamail.com).
I may nderstand if they decided to block an ISP server, but blocking servers of the United Nations is just MORONIC; I doubt this happens outside the US.
Has anyone encountered similar stupid acts?
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
However, I will not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Hotmail has been so unreliable of late that at work we're close to the point where Hotmail addresses will not be accepted as a primary email address. Incredibly stupid filters tend to be at the root of the problems. If too many messages look the same Hotmail calls them spam and they vanish into a black hole. Meanwhile, actual spam fills many a Hotmail inbox.
account and I am able to forward back and forth without problems. I'd like to see some independent verification of this.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I invited a friend to my gmail account, sending the invite to her hotmail account. It worked perfectly.
Less Talk, More Beer.
Quick, someone send me a gmail invite to my email at : gmailme ATT linuxathome DOTT c o m. I'll forward it to my yahoo and hotmail account and will post the results here. Okay, okay, this is a desperate attempt to get a gmail invite, but it's worth a try right?
Linux at home
Did you every stop to think that non-delivery could be the result of an issue at the senders end? Just a thought but they are in beta.
Someone has found a way to make lots of ./ers admit to using Hotmail.
Works fine... Sent an email from my gmail.com account to my hotmail.com account. Went directly to the InBox. And I have my Junk Email Filter set to 'Enhanced'.
And everyone was worried about GMAIL scanning/parsing emails... pffft!
I set my father up with a Gmail invite to a Hotmail account as of last night 11pm EST. It doesn't mean that you can't send the invites as IMs to your webmail-restricted friends.
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
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.
...half of Slashdots userbase appears to have a Hotmail address??
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Seems like the majority of my invites never arrive in my friend's inboxes. To get around this, I send the invite then go into my "Sent Mail" folder to look for the "Sign-up" URL that was sent. I just create a new email and copy and paste the original URL. I haven't had one of these blocked (that I know of). Cheers!
-- http://GatheredTogether.org - Ministries Helping Ministries
I had a friend send me a Google Mail invite to a yahoo address. It never arrived.
I'm certain that he used the correct address. I can understand "bulking" gmail invites (don't believe it's an honest mistake, but can understand it's possible) as I have had legitimate invites to mailing lists/web sites get placed into the bulk folder.
I got nothing in my Yahoo account. I was very careful to check the bulk foldler, but nothing ever showed up. Lucky for me, I was able to get the URL for the invite from his sent folder and signed up that way.
I've just gotten this to work...
(slightly edited to conceal my secret identity)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From : *
Sent : June 21, 2004 10:47:09 AM
To : *@hotmail.com
Subject : tester
Inbox
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: from mproxy.gmail.com ([216.239.56.245]) by mc5-f3.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.6824); Mon, 21 Jun 2004 06:47:09 -0700
Received: by mproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id q44so1741952cwc for ; Mon, 21 Jun 2004 06:47:09 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.11.118.20 with SMTP id q20mr562509cwc; Mon, 21 Jun 2004 06:47:09 -0700 (PDT)
X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jH5i3J0rEhEWO2gbDf1/JE0
Message-ID:
Return-Path: *@gmail.com
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 21 Jun 2004 13:47:10.0033 (UTC) FILETIME=[3FCD0C10:01C45796]
View E-mail Message Source
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
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did you block this?
I sent my wife a gmail invite to her hotmail account... and she accepted it/got the msg no problem...
i just sent a message from gmail to my hotmail and it was recieved... ?
I love a good conspiracy, but we might have rattled our tinfoil swords prematurely on this one...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
not servers. On one of my trips to the middle east a few years ago, we had about 5000 soldiers at our location, and about five 56k modems worth of bandwidth to serve them all. Yes, you read that correctly.
Think the neighborhood node for your cable modem is slow in the evenings? Brother, you aint seen nothin'.... and to make matters worse, they also throttled that bandwidth down even more by port... 80 was always the slowest. Fortunately for me, ftp wasn't throttled... so my downloads from kernel.org took hours instead of days (hey, a geek's gotta do what a geek's gotta do).
Increasing the pipe is only part of the issue; you have to filter all that traffic. If you don't control that information stream, classified information will leak, and viruses/worms will run riot. Even on a filtered system, one virus can really make your life miserable. I witnessed this on another delployment... the Anna Kournikova virus got loose in our network... it wrecked havoc for days before we got it under control (send a bunch of lonely, hormonally-poisoned, computer-equiped 19-year-olds a file purporting to be a picture of Anna Kournikova and see what happens... total chaos).
Increasing services to the troops is good, but it has to be done right, or you might end up with more problems than you started with.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another.
Yeah, I think that's the crux of it.
Actually, when a kind slashdotter sent me an invite, Yahoo didn't move it or block it...
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.
While it may bring universal (nationwide?) standards to e-mailing, you know that it will be seen as a potential source of revenue.
...and then they start taxing e-mails. A penny or two per e-mail is something the public could be cowed into, despire what we /.ers think about it, and by the time it can be adequately questioned, the public will be too accustomed to paying, the gov't too accustomed to collecting, and we'll be stuck.
Shortly thereafter, they'll set in place a registration system that wants you to put in a checking or credit card account with the rest of your information...
I think the continued deregulation is worth risking a GMail invite or two.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
Sorry, but I seem to be on the trailing edge of technology today. What is this invite stuff? Seems I don't get invited to nothing anymore!
Hotmail had this same problem with Orkut's invites a while back.
And as such most of his relatives have gmail accounts. I just photographed his sister's wedding; we've been using the gmail to send the large images back and forth (about 4mb to 6mb each).
Every email from gmail to me gets bounced or delayed for up to 4 days (gmail->hotmail). Any email from anyone else, goes in just fine.
Any email from hotmail->gmail, delayed. Any email using a relay such as my rr.com one, goes in just fine.
Conclusion: Hotmail is dicking with my emails and REALLY pissing me off.
I got my gmail account a few days ago, and the invite was sent to my hotmail account. No problems.
I just now sent a message from my gmail account to my hotmail account, and it was received just fine.
Maybe this was on Tuesday or Wedensday of last week, when there was akamai and hotmail issues? "Oh, he's not getting my email, so Hotmail must be blocking Gmail."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I've actually had a lot of issues with hotmail in the last... 3-6 months? Email bounce with server errors (accounts aren't full so that's not the problem), or there's a lengthy delay between sending the email and it actually being received.
So, this may not be so much indicative of a problem with hotmail and gmail as it is hotmail in general. Possibly they're lagged in processing the some bazillion spams that must pass through there, anyone have any stats on how much spam passes through hotmail daily?
I personally received a GMail invite. However, on my yahoo account I never received the invite. It was sent twice even! It didn't appear in my inbox OR bulk mail folder (I checked, double checked, and triple checked!). The only way I was able to receive it was the sender forwarded me a copy of the invite. Shame on Yahoo for this. I was going to just use the GMail account for novelty, but after a stunt like this I no longer trust Yahoo to be reliable and plan to switch 100% to my GMail address.
I had 2 invites this morning on my Hotmail addy, the first I pounced on, the second I left in the Bulk folder. 2 hours later the second invite is gone from the Bulk folder. Very suspicious.
because I got an invite yesterday and Mozilla's Junk Mail filter tagged it as spam.
SpamAssassin didn't, though, which proves that those scheming bastards obviously rigged Mozilla 1.7 so that it would filter gmail invitations. There's no other explanation, right?
It couldn't be because the invitation email looks a lot like spam...?
Nah.
As if hotmail and yahoo are in any position to point the finger at anyone for privacy issues!
Just to let you know, it was my birthday just a couple days ago. In case any of you had forgotten to get me something, I have a GOOD suggestion!
It's cheap
It's fun
It's timeless
It's a Gmail invitation!!! Yeah!
ryankelley at comcast dot net
if yer feelin generous!
I know this is Slashdot, where random blog posts are submitted and become fact simply because they bash Microsoft in some way (even though it's turned out that it's completely false), but do you care to cite who this mysterious, unnamed "third-party" is?
I get e-mail about Linux all the time, and it's never, ever sent to the Junk Mail folder. It's cool to pull random facts out of our asses, but perhaps we should take the time to step back and see how foolish it makes this community look? This article is completely false, and it's hilarious to see all the people giving their prepared lectures "Well, what would you expect from Microsoft? Blah blah blah."
My brother sent me a g-mail invite this morning to my hotmail account. When sending an invite gmail prompts you for a personalized message. Well my brother called me on the phone to let me know he sent the invite. I found it in my bulk mail folder, with everything but his personal message blanked out. The invite was essentially deleted. He had to send it to my Rediff account (the original 1 gig free email). So it's not a BS story
*Pity can be expressed with GMail invite to lazyhound2@hotmail.com.
One thing that GMail appears unable to do is to show images that are embedded into the email. That's a bit of a poor show, in my book :/. I'm not talking about remotely linked images, either (which you can show at the click of a link), but images that are sent in the email itself.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
I've noticed a few other things weird about yahoo and its infamous bulk folder. For about a week and a half now my /. subscription has been placed their instead of my inbox. I had to use a filter to prevent its misdirection.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
I haven't been able to log into gmail for the last few hours (Server Error / The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. / Please try again in 30 seconds. ) and ordinarily this wouldn't set off any alarms. After all, it is a beta service.
However, I checked in on Orkut, a Google-provided networking/community bulletin board site, and did a search in "Communities" for "gmail". Yesterday this returned dozens of groups, and at the moment it returns none. Other groups appear to be perfectly operational.
Is it a coincidence that Orkut gmail-related communities disappeared at the same time as Gmail did?