Keep a few throwaway Hotmail/Outlook addresses in your password manager, in case you need to use a Windows PC that demands a Microslop account. That's about the end of their usefulness.
Just like Internet Explorer used to be the program you used once -- and only once -- to download a proper browser.
I wonder if Microsoft actually likes running their free email service still. They wiped a ton of old Hotmail and Live.com emails some years ago (and then allowed new people to register those deleted names). I imagine they don't get much out of it anymore.
"Summary of changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement – June 15, 2021 [...] In the Outlook and Office Services sections, we’ve removed the Outlook.com section to clarify that an email address or username is not recycled into our system or assigned to another user."
It's wild to me they ever started doing this in the first place. And in 2013 no less, it isn't like the hijacking risk was some far off concept at that point.
It's certainly not free to run and maybe it doesn't really make sense for Microsoft to run Outlook.com anymore, except that it's an easy way to motivate people to having a Microsoft account.
Outlook.com certainly has to show up as an expense, one that Microsoft would like to reduce. When you look at what other providers charge for a single email account, it's hard to see Microsoft making money of Outlook.com. There's obviously something to be said for scale, but still, it must cost them something.
They wiped all the emails from my 25 year old Hotmail account. Pretty weak. I refuse to use Microsoft products except if forced, and do my best to evangelize this position.
Just had a friend reach out yesterday about this issue. His outlook account for 10+ years started having issues receiving emails from his dad and a company he works with.
All I could find was that his dad’s email was missing SPF/DMARC but the other email address that was having problems looked like it was configured correctly.
I only was able to get a screenshot of the email voice his dad received and it mentioned being on a block list (like in the article).
My clients have been experiencing this forever; the logs SAY "temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation." but really the emails are never going to get delivered. I have to get MailChimp or Mailgun to rotate the IPs.
It looks like all it takes is one person to mark your email as spam, even by accident. Note that these are mailing lists which they signed up for in MailChimp case OR transactional emails in the Mailgun case.
It's only hotmail/outlook that we constantly have this issue with, Google etc. are all fine.
Often these "spam" reports by end users are just accidental clicks as well. Many of the abuse reports we get are like an email from someone's Mum and visibly legitimate. At other times there are users who use the Report Spam function as a kind of inbox management tool - a way of moving mail away so they don't have to see it because Trash or Delete or whatever is just further away from their pointer.
I tell my friends and family to never click unsubscribe links, unless they had proactively subscribed. Buying something from a company that requires an email does not count. unsolicited marketing emails are spam and should be treated as such. Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com.
"Report spam" is quicker and easier than "unsubscribe".
Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers, so it must be common enough to warrant Gmail developer attention.
It feels like there's quite a lot of spin on this. There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected. It only really seems to mention Estonia, and probably only a region of it.
The ISP there claims they haven't received any reports of SPAM. But that sounds wrong. No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.
So putting that together, it seems like a small ISP screwed up and let spammers go wild, and Outlook blocked them for it. I can't really fault Outlook for that.
My org (USA) was affected. I wasn't the primary person dealing with it, but from what I gather one user marked one of our emails as junk, and then suddenly all of our emails to Outlook users started getting blocked.
Someone recently leveraged some kind of automated spam attack against my domain using Zendesk's email servers. For some reason, Zendesk doesn't enforce SPF and DKIM checks when opening new tickets, so I got flooded with "your new account has been registered" and "thank you for filing a ticket" emails.
I blocked off Zendesk entirely because they didn't fix their shitty email system. The other newsletter mail services (mailgun/sendgrid/etc.) are just as bad for this.
There are plenty of reasons why large email senders could (and should) be on reputation blacklists. None of these email delivery companies seem to care very much about the spam they send until shit hits the fan, and now that it did it seems everyone blames the people maintaining the blacklists.
A few years ago, in my university we have a big problem at the beginning of the semester to contact ~10K students, in particular when they register to our Moodle platform and the server sends them a message.
Gmail was usually ok.
Yahoo had some max messages per day.
But Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever just made the messages disappear, no spam folder, no bounce, just disappear. We had some success telling the students to send us a message from their Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever address half an hour before registration. This adds our address to some special secret list for that account, and our later messages (usually) reach them. (It may fail. It may fail. IWOMM. YMMV.)
Ever since Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft entered the AI age,
the quality went downhill. Someone should analyse this objectively
since right now this may be more of an impression. But people are
noticeably angrier than they used to be about Microsoft, say, 5
years ago, to today.
To be fair, Outlook.com has always been a bit shitty, if you're trying to deliver email to them. Last time it was reasonably good the service was still called Hotmail.
The problem is that we've allowed email to be centralized around a few massive providers, who do not care about customer service. If you're large enough, you probably have a contact at Microsoft for Outlook. Everyone else has to yell into the void and sometimes that works.
I created my first Outlook account when I was young. Now, 30 years later and its still my primary account. I can't imagine how I would migrate to another email address if Microslop would begin ruining Outlook by forced subscription or something. My digital life is in M$ hands at the moment.
Yep this. I migrated from Gmail to my own domain years ago. It was painful. Weirdly enough, I think the longest holdouts were my parents, who were still sending email to my Gmail account a decade after I stopped using the address.
I moved my email to Fastmail, and I’ve been very happy ever since. But now that I own the domain, moving to a different provider - if I ever need to - would be trivial.
I moved to Fastmail, set it up with Gmail so I received forwarded emails. Years later there’s still a long tail of senders using my Gmail, but I get the emails forwarded, and only actually log in to Gmail every six months or so.
Now I only use Windows for legacy software that my customers force on me.
Fedora has not just been liberating, but jaw dropping. I actually felt offended that I had wasted so much time on debian-family/ubuntu/mint and windows.
The concept, way back when, was great. I tried to use it, by a previous name, for replicating / distributing data backups and it always worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable went wrong, and I had to re-set it up essentially from scratch and it worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable went wrong.
In the intervening 15+ years, OneDrive has never made my experience of computing better. It has only ever nagged, slowed, and failed. And that was before Microslop went down the x% AI coding path.
I personally like when you open any office doc, do nothing to it before closing and you get the scary warning asking if you want to save your document (to onedrive) implying all is lost if you select no. I am sure millions of tech unsavvy people have been conned into sending their data to Bill Gates.
I've had this exact problem for years. My IP addresses have been used for 15+ years for sending e-mail, they are spam-free, but Microsoft keeps blocking them. Every two months or so I have to ask them to unblock the IP again, then I can send mails to Outlook again, until they just random decide to block me again. It's an absolute clown show.
As long term Outlook.com user all I can say it's their service is extremely unreliable, my emails are either not delivered at all or end up in junk mail, some emails I don't receive at all or my partners are rate limited sometimes receiving their emails with hours long delays.
I assume also their junk filters block some emails and there is no way to avoid it, you repeatedly add senders to safe senders list, even to safe subscriptions and their email still end up marked as junk even after years long communication from same addresses.
As backup when something important I write email to recipient from gmail whether they received my email from outlook only to find out my email was never received.
I've stopped diagnosing outlook/hotmail/live delivery issues about 12 years go, they simply do not give a single fuck about their customers. It used to be different, about 18 years ago orso, they had ways to contact them and resolve such issue.
Everyone who runs an email server knows Microslop doesn't care about receiving its customer's emails. The best thing you can do is migrate away.
No worries. If you migrate your email server to Azure(TM) the delivery is guaranteed.
Keep a few throwaway Hotmail/Outlook addresses in your password manager, in case you need to use a Windows PC that demands a Microslop account. That's about the end of their usefulness.
Just like Internet Explorer used to be the program you used once -- and only once -- to download a proper browser.
I wonder if Microsoft actually likes running their free email service still. They wiped a ton of old Hotmail and Live.com emails some years ago (and then allowed new people to register those deleted names). I imagine they don't get much out of it anymore.
I wonder how many accounts on other services were then hijacked using "forgot my password" attacks.
UPDATE: After a bit of digging it looks like they started the username recycling policy in 2013, may have quietly stopped doing that in 2018 but formalized no longer doing that in 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20230627104616/https://www.micro...
"Summary of changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement – June 15, 2021 [...] In the Outlook and Office Services sections, we’ve removed the Outlook.com section to clarify that an email address or username is not recycled into our system or assigned to another user."
It's wild to me they ever started doing this in the first place. And in 2013 no less, it isn't like the hijacking risk was some far off concept at that point.
It's certainly not free to run and maybe it doesn't really make sense for Microsoft to run Outlook.com anymore, except that it's an easy way to motivate people to having a Microsoft account.
Outlook.com certainly has to show up as an expense, one that Microsoft would like to reduce. When you look at what other providers charge for a single email account, it's hard to see Microsoft making money of Outlook.com. There's obviously something to be said for scale, but still, it must cost them something.
They wiped all the emails from my 25 year old Hotmail account. Pretty weak. I refuse to use Microsoft products except if forced, and do my best to evangelize this position.
Most people will never pay for email service. Which leaves you Google, MS or god forbid your own ISP.
Just had a friend reach out yesterday about this issue. His outlook account for 10+ years started having issues receiving emails from his dad and a company he works with.
All I could find was that his dad’s email was missing SPF/DMARC but the other email address that was having problems looked like it was configured correctly.
I only was able to get a screenshot of the email voice his dad received and it mentioned being on a block list (like in the article).
My clients have been experiencing this forever; the logs SAY "temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation." but really the emails are never going to get delivered. I have to get MailChimp or Mailgun to rotate the IPs.
It looks like all it takes is one person to mark your email as spam, even by accident. Note that these are mailing lists which they signed up for in MailChimp case OR transactional emails in the Mailgun case.
It's only hotmail/outlook that we constantly have this issue with, Google etc. are all fine.
Often these "spam" reports by end users are just accidental clicks as well. Many of the abuse reports we get are like an email from someone's Mum and visibly legitimate. At other times there are users who use the Report Spam function as a kind of inbox management tool - a way of moving mail away so they don't have to see it because Trash or Delete or whatever is just further away from their pointer.
I tell my friends and family to never click unsubscribe links, unless they had proactively subscribed. Buying something from a company that requires an email does not count. unsolicited marketing emails are spam and should be treated as such. Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com.
> Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com
That’s typically not a disguise but a clear means of indicating that you can reply to the email
"Report spam" is quicker and easier than "unsubscribe".
Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers, so it must be common enough to warrant Gmail developer attention.
> Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers
Unfortunately close to 100% of the spam I'm flagging causes this popup now :-/
I'm getting a dozen spam a day now on my Gmail account ... I think they're losing the battle.
"whatever Microslop is doing"
Indirect reference to this recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230704
It's not just Outlook, it's all MS email products as well as Yahoo.
These are emails that our customers have specifically requested and we get support tickets blaming us.
It's been like this for years.
I'm in the privileged position to advise clients to move away from hotmail/live if they want uninterrupted email delivery.
It feels like there's quite a lot of spin on this. There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected. It only really seems to mention Estonia, and probably only a region of it.
The ISP there claims they haven't received any reports of SPAM. But that sounds wrong. No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.
So putting that together, it seems like a small ISP screwed up and let spammers go wild, and Outlook blocked them for it. I can't really fault Outlook for that.
My org (USA) was affected. I wasn't the primary person dealing with it, but from what I gather one user marked one of our emails as junk, and then suddenly all of our emails to Outlook users started getting blocked.
> There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected.
How many users would you see as the threshold then?
Since you stated that there is a spin to this, how many users would go over your defined threshold level?
Someone recently leveraged some kind of automated spam attack against my domain using Zendesk's email servers. For some reason, Zendesk doesn't enforce SPF and DKIM checks when opening new tickets, so I got flooded with "your new account has been registered" and "thank you for filing a ticket" emails.
I blocked off Zendesk entirely because they didn't fix their shitty email system. The other newsletter mail services (mailgun/sendgrid/etc.) are just as bad for this.
There are plenty of reasons why large email senders could (and should) be on reputation blacklists. None of these email delivery companies seem to care very much about the spam they send until shit hits the fan, and now that it did it seems everyone blames the people maintaining the blacklists.
The article has hyperlinks in it, e.g. to this:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5786144/...
which comes from an ESP serving millions of users.
A few years ago, in my university we have a big problem at the beginning of the semester to contact ~10K students, in particular when they register to our Moodle platform and the server sends them a message.
Gmail was usually ok.
Yahoo had some max messages per day.
But Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever just made the messages disappear, no spam folder, no bounce, just disappear. We had some success telling the students to send us a message from their Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever address half an hour before registration. This adds our address to some special secret list for that account, and our later messages (usually) reach them. (It may fail. It may fail. IWOMM. YMMV.)
Ever since Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft entered the AI age, the quality went downhill. Someone should analyse this objectively since right now this may be more of an impression. But people are noticeably angrier than they used to be about Microsoft, say, 5 years ago, to today.
To be fair, Outlook.com has always been a bit shitty, if you're trying to deliver email to them. Last time it was reasonably good the service was still called Hotmail.
The problem is that we've allowed email to be centralized around a few massive providers, who do not care about customer service. If you're large enough, you probably have a contact at Microsoft for Outlook. Everyone else has to yell into the void and sometimes that works.
Why do you feel the need to pollute HN with terrible slashdot jokes?
I created my first Outlook account when I was young. Now, 30 years later and its still my primary account. I can't imagine how I would migrate to another email address if Microslop would begin ruining Outlook by forced subscription or something. My digital life is in M$ hands at the moment.
I would start migrating to an email domain that you control. It will come useful at one point or another.
Yep this. I migrated from Gmail to my own domain years ago. It was painful. Weirdly enough, I think the longest holdouts were my parents, who were still sending email to my Gmail account a decade after I stopped using the address.
I moved my email to Fastmail, and I’ve been very happy ever since. But now that I own the domain, moving to a different provider - if I ever need to - would be trivial.
I moved to Fastmail, set it up with Gmail so I received forwarded emails. Years later there’s still a long tail of senders using my Gmail, but I get the emails forwarded, and only actually log in to Gmail every six months or so.
I learned this lesson the hard way with OneDrive.
Now I only use Windows for legacy software that my customers force on me.
Fedora has not just been liberating, but jaw dropping. I actually felt offended that I had wasted so much time on debian-family/ubuntu/mint and windows.
OneDrive was born enshittified.
The concept, way back when, was great. I tried to use it, by a previous name, for replicating / distributing data backups and it always worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable went wrong, and I had to re-set it up essentially from scratch and it worked great... for a few days, maybe weeks. And then something unrecoverable went wrong.
In the intervening 15+ years, OneDrive has never made my experience of computing better. It has only ever nagged, slowed, and failed. And that was before Microslop went down the x% AI coding path.
I personally like when you open any office doc, do nothing to it before closing and you get the scary warning asking if you want to save your document (to onedrive) implying all is lost if you select no. I am sure millions of tech unsavvy people have been conned into sending their data to Bill Gates.
You could start the process now, before the ruin?
It's has been like this for a long time. For me hotmail is unusable because some emails just never arrive due to their spam filtering.
I’m guessing they connected CoPilot to the inbound filter and it is doing stupid and unexpected things.
I've had this exact problem for years. My IP addresses have been used for 15+ years for sending e-mail, they are spam-free, but Microsoft keeps blocking them. Every two months or so I have to ask them to unblock the IP again, then I can send mails to Outlook again, until they just random decide to block me again. It's an absolute clown show.
As long term Outlook.com user all I can say it's their service is extremely unreliable, my emails are either not delivered at all or end up in junk mail, some emails I don't receive at all or my partners are rate limited sometimes receiving their emails with hours long delays.
I assume also their junk filters block some emails and there is no way to avoid it, you repeatedly add senders to safe senders list, even to safe subscriptions and their email still end up marked as junk even after years long communication from same addresses.
As backup when something important I write email to recipient from gmail whether they received my email from outlook only to find out my email was never received.
I've stopped diagnosing outlook/hotmail/live delivery issues about 12 years go, they simply do not give a single fuck about their customers. It used to be different, about 18 years ago orso, they had ways to contact them and resolve such issue.
fuck big tech :)