Important info for users with Microsoft email addresses (Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, Live)

A.D. · Jan 21, 2016

This information is re-posted from here, but it is so informative I thought it was well worth passing onto users...

Posted by Thomas on Aug 28, 2015
I currently do not recommend to use any Microsoft email address for this site as (some) emails may be blocked by Microsoft's email servers. Note that "blocked“ means that the email will neither be in your inbox, nor in any spam or junk folders. They are silently deleted without your knowledge.

Background Info
The problem is that Microsoft carries the spam filtering "somewhat“ too far. Therefore also some (or probably many) legitimate emails are flagged as junk and are deleted before the recipients have the chance to decide for themselves whether the email is actually spam or not. In my case, I assume that already the first email sent to an MS address (which was a XenForo confirmation email) has been blocked.

After a member told me that he didn't receive any confirmation email, I noticed that all of my members that had MS addresses didn't confirm their account. So I implemented all by MS required "anti-spam“ measures (SPF, DKIM, FCrDNS and Sender ID). I also checked if my server was on any blacklist, but didn't find any entry. Unfortunately, that had no effect as all of my test emails that I sent to my outlook.com address didn't arrive.

Therefore I contacted the Outlook.com Deliverability Support. After about one week of email communication (where most of the text was actually boilerplate) the employee told me the reason that my Emails were blocked was because they have been flagged as "suspicious“. Unfortunatetly they didn't disclose why the Emails were flagged. They also told me that they have "implemented mitigation for your [my] deliverability problem“. However „lifting the block does not guarantee that your email will be delivered to a user's inbox.“

Note, that I'm not the only one who is affected by Microsoft's email blocking. Actually it seems to be a widespread problem. As I've no idea why my emails were blocked, I have to assume that it's not unlikely that this can happen at any time again which would be very unfortunate for my customers as they may miss (potentially important) add-on update notifications. Therefore I've decided to "officially“ not recommend to use an MS address for this website.
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Important info for users with Microsoft email addresses (Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, Live)

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Important info for users with Microsoft email addresses (Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, Live)

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