Nostradoofus

This blog has previously chronicled Hotmail’s unsuitability for business. Now, at last, we have a solution to Hotmail’s error-prone spam filter.

To restate the problem: Hotmail has a terrible spam filter, which makes it hard for a legitimate business to deliver mail there. Hotmail misclassifies spam in both directions, but mainly rejects too much legitimate mail, failing to make the most obvious, basic inferences from user behavior. For example, if a user marks a message from A as “not spam,” then any other mail engine would assume all future messages from A are not spam. Not Hotmail. It doggedly continues to mark all mail from A as spam. Worse, every message in the spam folder is deleted without warning after only 72 hours, making it impossible for a legitimate e-goods business to prove delivery.

My efforts to register with Microsoft as a legitimate sender, via SenderID and other initiatives, were ignored. MSFT appears not to actively support these initiatives, and they certainly do not respond to inquiries. What to do?

Google Apps.

Google Apps provides hosted email, using Google’s mailserver to send your messages. Because Google is too big to ignore, Hotmail dutifully delivers whatever you send. Done.

Now, if you are a spammer, this probably will not work. Google will catch you and shut you down. But for legitimate senders, this is a total solution that costs $50 per year.

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