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.
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!
Mountains out of mole hiles. It's just a spam filter blocking bot mail.
Quality over Quantity.http://www.virusgaming.com/
I got an invite from my buddy, he even sent it to me using his gmail address. me thinks this story is FUD.
Either that or the Gmail invite reads like:
LIMITED TIME OFFER!
NATURAL ENHANCEMENT!
ABOUT YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT
FREE FREE FREE FREE
SIGN UP NOW!
http://gmail.com
For more info, I send you this file in order to have your advice.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 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.
How do you suggest that they do this?
I really wish they could do it, I'm in the military and am looking at one of those long stints away from loved ones soon... but the fact of the matter is, if it's not for official military use, it won't get funding. That and rolling cable in the desert just makes one more security issue to deal with which requires manpower we can't spare right now.
Yeah yeah, but WIRELESS!.... is a security nightmare right now and lets face it, no matter how many times COMSEC and COMPUSEC are briefed there is always some nimrod on the network violating the security measures.
War isn't about being comfortable, the military's primary concern is that we stay alive, not that we have email. They've actually gone to great lengths to set up call centers and email access as it is, but you could easily wait in line for 2 hours for your turn. But trust me when I tell you that those connections that are allowed are closely monitored (fewer connections mean fewer resources required to monitor them).
Warfare is as much about information control as manpower these days.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
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
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.