Sending Mail to Hotmail Users?

Cafesolo wonders: "I'm developing a web application using PHP. It has a user registration system that sends a link via email to activate new accounts. I've found that sending mails to Hotmail accounts is very difficult, because the spam filter is very strong and it filters lots of non-junk messages. I think the spam filter blocks any email whose domain isn't in an internal whitelist (which might contain popular domains, like hotmail.com itself, gmail.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, etc). Most of my users have Hotmail emails. I can't simply tell my users to read the junk folder because most of them are not computer-savvy and that seems to be a bit confusing to them. Has anyone managed to solve this problem? Did somebody try to contact Microsoft? Is there any way to get whitelisted? Can an independent programmer get his domain whitelisted?"

Comments

Very big assumptions.

[Vellmont]

You sound like you're making some very large assumptions about what's actually triggering the spam filters at hotmail. What makes you think it's your domain, and not the crappy MTA you're using? Spammers often use non-standard MTAs that anti-spam programs have learned to identify through header analysis. Have you tested sending mail from a standard mailer like sendmail or postfix to a hotmail account? You obviously need to confirm what's actually causing hotmail to tag your mail as spam and stop making assumptions.

Trial and error works.

[The MAZZTer]

Get yourself a hotmail account and have PHP fire off e-mails to it. Tweak as needed until you get one through that's not marked as spam.

Re:Do yourself a favour

[Bogtha]

what user is worth keeping who isn't "computer-savvy" enough to understand what a Junk Mail folder is?

The kind of user that pays you money? And there are a lot of people that don't understand spam filtering. Unlike most other email concepts, this one doesn't really have a snail-mail analogue.

send them all Gmail invites

I already do this. Without fail, every single Hotmail user that I have sent an invite to has either signed up and not switched, or not bothered signing up at all. Hotmail users are happy with crap. Think about it - if they weren't, they wouldn't be with Hotmail in the first place, would they?

Re:Tools are available

[TopShelf]

Hotmail is perfectly fine, it's just that the parent of this thread made it sound like a service could guarantee that this guy's message could get into user's Inboxes. Hotmail has the option of having a whitelist-only Inbox, so I was pointing out that those services won't do.