Last Friday, I received a call by a friend who invited me to an Endstille
gig. He asked me why I didn't reply to his mail. Odd, I thought, for I did
reply within 10 minutes after receiving. A day or so later, still no email,
so I decided to do a little testing.
I opened up a hotmail test account and just tried to mail it. The hotmail
mail server positively told my server that the message was accepted, but
the mail was no where to be found. Not in the Inbox, Junk folder or any
other place. It simply disappeared.
After a few struggles, I found a way to contact the postmaster(s) and quickly
after mailing them my complaints, I received a canned answer back. The
sophisticated SmartScreen filtering technology made my messages disappear
in thin air. Smart indeed and thanks for not informing the sender of this
block.
The fun part of the mail, I'll quote:
I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters
specifically entail, as this would render them useless.
Right! So they're so sophisticated that there's probably an easy
way to get around them. Security through obscurity...
The friendly canned mail also suggested I'd use SPF, a technique to
specify in DNS records who is allowed to send out emails on behalf of the
domain. Great ... but I've been using that for a long time, so it
wouldn't help.
Maybe I'm on some RBL? Nope, can't find it. A quick search however
turned out that I'm not alone here. And based on the time stamp of that
document, this problem exists for over a year already.
So, as of yet, I can't send out mail (or reply) to my friends with a
hotmail account. Tough luck. If you want to reach me, use a different
Reply-To header.
