[Mailman-Users] list messages lost to Hotmail subscribers lost

[Mark Sapiro]

Jeff Donsbach wrote:
>
>   I recently started having delivery problems with list messages to
>Hotmail subscribers. The problem seems to have started on or around
>June 10. I checked the syslog file and was seeing occasional (452 too
>many recipients for delivery) errors. I changed SMTP_MAX_RCPTS to 5
>and SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION to 5 as well. That seems to have
>cleared up the '452' errors. All messages handed off to Hotmail users
>in the last 24 hours or so have (250  <messageid at domain.tld> Queued
>mail for delivery)  successful return codes (as far as I see). Yet,
>none of the list subscribers are receiving messages. If I send a test
>message to some of the subscribers directly (not via Mailman), they
>get it.
>
>Beyond telling people to dump Hotmail, does anyone have any "best
>practices" they can share for getting Mailman messages delivered to
>Hotmail subscribers successfully? I have already read FAQ 3.42 on the
>new FAQ wiki (thanks, Barry and Co). And, I have already read -
>http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx , and my co-admin and I are
>looking into implementing SenderId/SPF keys for the domain DNS
>records.


Welcome to the world of pain and frustration that is dealing with
Microsoft and Windows live mail spam filtering - yes, they do accept
your mail and then silently discard it.

I had the same problem. I hammered and hammered with the customer
support forms. I could never answer their follow-ups because they
wouldn't accept mail from my postmaster address which I used thinking
it would give me credibility. My advice here is to sign up for and use
a hotmail address in your communications.

Anyway, they finally put me on a 2 month 'mitigation' during which my
mail was accepted and their spam filters were supposed to retrain, but
the day the mitigation ended, the started flaging >10% of my list mail
as spam (I had also added SPF records prior to the mitigation).

My mail still mostly falls in the 'yellow' (10% to 90% spam) range on
'SNDS' (their Smart Network Data Services reporting service), but it
is delivered to either inboxes or spam folders, and all mail is
delivered to the inbox of those who whitelist my domain.

This in spite of the fact that my complaint rate is essentially zero.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan