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.