Here’s a nice example of the woeful state of affairs that the spammers of the world have created for us. Last night, Tracie’s email to her aunt started bouncing. Her aunt uses MSN Live Hotmail Whatever. The error message says that Tracie’s email is being rejected because either my domain has been blocked, or my IP (which is dynamically allocated, of course) has been blocked, or something. It’s kind of vague on the exact reason.<\/p>\n
Now, just for the record: I’m not a spammer. I hate spam. This site doesn’t have any sort of mailing list and I don’t harvest any sort of information about who visits it. (Now and then I become curious and look at my server logs, but I’m looking only at information like total number of visits, not information about individual visitors.) To the best of my knowledge, none of my machines are being used as spam relays. My home machines are locked down tight as well as being behind a firewall, and I know from experience that my domain host comes down hard on any account that they even think might be compromised.<\/p>\n
It’s entirely possible, however, that my domain name has been hijacked and used for spam. To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing I can do about this. If someone sets up their bulk mailer to make its effluence look like it originated from my domain, there’s really nothing I can do.<\/p>\n
Okay, back to the story. The MSN rejection message actually provided a link for investigating this sort of mail problem, so I hunted around on the site. It quickly became obvious that the site was oriented towards two audiences: people who use MSN for their email, and people who run mail servers. I’m in neither of those audiences. My outgoing mail is handled by Comcast. I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the process other than what I learned from their support site when I was setting up my email clients.<\/p>\n
I found a form for submitting a request for help. The form was, of course, oriented towards the audience that handles mail servers. Basically the form was set up for someone who does run some sort of bulk email service (or is just a business with a big mailing list for sending out ads and stuff) and manages their own servers. I filled it out to the best of my knowledge, inserting pithy comments about how irrelevant much of it was to someone who was merely trying to find out why, exactly, MSN had decided that Tracie shouldn’t be allowed to send email to her aunt.<\/p>\n
Some hours later I got a canned response from “Peter” at MSN that asked me to provide information that the form had already asked for. I wrote back and explained that I can’t provide some of the information because I don’t have shell access on Comcast’s SMTP servers and reiterated the information which I’d already provided. No response so far. I’m not even sure whether the message went anywhere because they somehow cleverly hid the Repy-to: field so that when I replied to the message, the To: field came up blank. I copied the address from the message but it was some ridiculous long address with lots of periods and stuff.<\/p>\n
Anyway, in my humble opinion, this is not a good way to combat spam. My IP address is dynamically allocated. Maybe someone did send spam from it, but it wasn’t me and I can’t do anything about the address that Comcast hands to me. Maybe someone did use my domain name for spam, but there’s really nothing I can do about that either. Heaven knows that hotmail.com has been used for plenty of spam; does MSN block their own email?<\/p>\n
So, Linda, that’s why you haven’t heard from Tracie yesterday or today. I have no idea how to resolve this situation. You could try contacting MSN and telling them that you’d appreciate it if your niece was permitted to send email to you, but you’re likely to encounter the same sterling level of customer service that I’ve encountered.<\/p>\n
UPDATE:<\/strong><\/p>\n Just after making this post I received a new response from MSN:<\/p>\n \nHello Adam,<\/p>\n Thank you for contacting Windows Live Hotmail Domain Support, my name is Jaime.<\/p>\n We are aware of the situation and are working with Comcast to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n Thank you for your patience.<\/p>\n Best Regards,<\/p>\n Jaime<\/p>\n Windows Live Hotmail Domain Support\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, that doesn’t really answer all of the relevant questions. For instance, why do they need to work with Comcast at all? MSN initiated the blocking of my email–they can just as easily unblock it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s a nice example of the woeful state of affairs that the spammers of the world have created for us. Last night, Tracie’s email to her aunt started bouncing. Her aunt uses MSN Live Hotmail Whatever. The error message says that Tracie’s email is being rejected because either my domain has been blocked, or my… Continue reading MSN\/Hotmail Idiocy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}