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Microsoft had marked an email from a professor from an vt.edu domain email address as spam causing me to miss an interview for a PhD funding.
by tonmoy 4y ago
Microsoft had marked an email from a professor from an vt.edu domain email address as spam causing me to miss an interview for a PhD funding.
- codegeek 4y agoMicrosoft is especially notorious for flagging legit emails as spam if they are not from one of the regular providers.
- cube00 4y agoFlagging if you're lucky, they outright 550 refused my mail until I joined their sender program and applied to have my domain unblocked. Then they proceeded to gaslight me claiming my mail was never blocked even after I forwarded their own error messages and IDs back to them.
- codegeek 4y agoyea unfortunately I have seen those as well. It is ridiculous at times.
- anonydsfsfs 4y agoYou got a 550? Lucky! When I worked at a non-profit that hosted our own email server, we had many instances where Microsoft would /dev/null our newsletter e-mails. Their servers would give a 250 indicating acceptance, but the e-mail was nowhere to be found (and yes, we checked the spam folder).
- donmcronald 4y agoThat's nothing compared to the joy of dealing with legit emails that are flagged as high confidence phishing.
- maestroia 4y agoRegular provider == (Microsoft 365 || an Exchange Server)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoHonest question- why can't people sue for this?
- throwawayboise 4y agoEmail (SMTP) has no delivery guarantees. It's basically "best effort." If you want guaranteed delivery with proof and tracability, send a registered letter at the post office, FedEx, etc.
- shadowgovt 4y agoOn what grounds would they sue for? Email is not the post; there is no legal right to receive one or to have one routed. If one wants such legal protections, there is the post. (Now, should there be such a right? That's an interesting question. But a world in which one exists would raise the bar to starting one's own email server even higher).
- amf12 4y agoA legal protection would mostly entail disabling of spam filters.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoYou can't sue if a product doesn't work as intended and results in harm?
- shadowgovt 4y agoIt depends on the circumstances. In some cases, when guarantees are made and those guarantees are broken, you can sue civilly to be made whole (in a context like this where there was no bodily harm, merely an opportunity missed). It's real unlikely any such guarantees were made. To do so would be extremely foolish for several reasons (the false-positive rate of spam identification is known and emails can fail to deliver because of an error at either end of the transaction).
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
- Fomite 4y agoFormer VT employee: It's not just Microsoft. Virginia Tech has a problem with their stuff getting flagged as spam.
- codethief 4y agoI can't find it right now but a few years ago there was a post here on HN by a grad school admission officer who recommended to never use Gmail for applications, no matter what school you apply to. Apparently, it's anything but uncommon for emails from @*.edu to end up in spam.