Hotmail / Live recepients blocked or whatever?

I've got a really weird issue on my mailserver. It's just postfix on CentOS 5 (all installed via virtualmin) and roundcube is used as well.

Sending to @live.com or @hotmail.com won't deliver (no error messages either btw).

Receiving works.

Sending to @live.com or @hotmail.com via "Reply" works normal too.. this happens in both Email client (Thunderbird & Mail.app) and Webmail (roundcube).

Is there some kind of filter I need to change? It's realy weird behaviour.

6 Replies

Hotmail has a habit of just throwing messages it doesn't like into a black hole. Check this this post for the mental contortions necessary to overcome this (non-RFC-compliant) behaviour.

Thanks.. Stupid MS, this really sucks >.<;

I was hoping for a simple solution, but as far as I could read through the thread is a lot of unnecessary hassle. I'll keep an eye on the thread anyways.

It pains me to think I am on MS's side here, but…

I'm not sure why people expect that five minutes after they register a domain and fire up their VPS they are going to be delivering straight into every inbox in the world.

If you want to work on the problem, more info than you probably want is available at http://postmaster.live.com/

AFAIK a big part of MS's first layer of anti-spam is based on the sender "reputation". So if you just put up a new server on a new domain, you have zero reputation and they assume (probably correctly, nothing personal) that you're a spammer. Running through their assorted hoops is supposed to be a way to jumpstart the process I think, but I've never done anything special and my domains seem perfectly able to deliver to hotmail.

And RFC-compliant or not, lots of servers blackhole messages they don't like. If you have any serious volume you can't do content filtering at SMTP time, so your spam/virus filters either blackhole or (worse) send NDR's.

> I'm not sure why people expect that five minutes after they register a domain and fire up their VPS they are going to be delivering straight into every inbox in the world.
Why not? I could maybe see a brand-new domain being worth a minor demerit in the filtering rules, but certainly not worth a black hole all by itself.

> If you have any serious volume you can't do content filtering at SMTP time.
Completely bogus. How about this: if you can't do content filtering at SMTP time, then you're trying to handle too much volume with too few resources. There is no excuse for blackholing. If you're busy, send a 4xx.

Silly thing was, the domain I was trying to send e-mail from was first hosted on a reseller. Now moved over to my vps and suddenly hotmail/live stops accepting the mails unless their 'replies'.

And it would've been nice for them to return a notice that they couldn't deliver the message.

@Navi:

Silly thing was, the domain I was trying to send e-mail from was first hosted on a reseller. Now moved over to my vps and suddenly hotmail/live stops accepting the mails unless their 'replies'.
Your new IP address doesn't have a 'good' reputation yet. Microsoft's behaviour is inexcusable. Just because you are big doesn't mean you can ignore the rules.

Reply

Please enter an answer
Tips:

You can mention users to notify them: @username

You can use Markdown to format your question. For more examples see the Markdown Cheatsheet.

> I’m a blockquote.

I’m a blockquote.

[I'm a link] (https://www.google.com)

I'm a link

**I am bold** I am bold

*I am italicized* I am italicized

Community Code of Conduct