11 ms·

Microsoft Outlook Blocking All Email from Tutanota.com Domain as Spam

227 points by grammers 3y ago

patchtopic 3y ago
anti competitive!
snitch182 3y ago
My private email server gets completly blocked on regular bases. They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider. You get no response from them whatsoever. You have to fill out a form und wait a couple of days. You can however sign up for a 200$ whitelist... from a different company owned by guess who.
- reiichiroh 3y ago
  What third party?
- literalAardvark 3y ago
  I would assume any provider that allows you to send email also allows a great deal of spam, so this might not be unwarranted. My provider is also frequently blacklisted, I just don't use it to send mail anymore.
  - jonathanstrange 3y ago
    What the original poster describes is anti-competitive behavior, for this reason alone the idea of blocking the whole IP range of a competing email service provider is very bad. Personally, I wouldn't use an email provider that blocks spam server-side without an option to turn this off because these filters often block legitimate mails and can cause all kinds of annoying problems.
    - literalAardvark 3y ago
      Kind of, but parent poster was talking about his own small server, which is likely hosted on a residential IP pool that's pretty much guaranteed to be blocked all the time. All mail providers mass block IPs, because the spam from some ISPs is literally too much to even filter. I run a few high volume (very legitimate) servers and it's been a huge pain in the butt to keep them off of blacklists, but at the same time we've also had spammer problems and I totally get it.
- petemir 3y ago
  I worked for a company that sent travel deals newsletters everyday. Deliverability to (then) Hotmail was abysmal. We then got the recommendation of a company (cannot remember their name) that could analyse our IPs and give recommendations. Naturally, the recommendations were the ones that you could find everywhere so they were not useful, but the company did have access to MSFT's score of our IPs, so we could know when we were close to being blacklisted and could take action/ramp down/etc. How did they have access to those internal IP scores? I don't know, but it seems totally fishy :). For sure we spent 5k+ USD yearly in this service (which is a huge amount of money in a 3rd. world country), and "somehow" after paying our deliverability did improve, despite doing the same things as before, as the recommendations were not ingenious. So yeah, e-mail deliverability is a mafia, for sure.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Was it "Return Path"? If so, yes, they are just a racket. They ostensibly provide consulting services on this stuff, but in reality they have a (exclusive?) deal with Microsoft to change scores and allowlist, so you just pay them and they get your email through. Pricing is based on volume of email, I think we were paying $10k/yr for our emails to get to Microsoft hosted addresses.
    - petemir 3y ago
      I cannot 100% confirm it but "Return Path" (now Validity) definitely rings a loud bell :), and the figure is also in the ballpark -- we definitely started to send less e-mails just to be able to afford/test them. I felt outraged at the moment because it was clearly a "pay-to-play" scheme, but ~8 years ago the number of Hotmail/Outlook addresses in my country was definitely substantial. Probably it still is.
  - ksjskskskkk 3y ago
    sounds like you paid to have their spam filter look the other way for your ips
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    How did they have access to those internal IP scores? When I was doing DMARC stuff professionally, plenty of big names were willing to send DMARC reports our way. Microsoft was the only company to give us full text.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 3y ago
  > They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider. That's not necessarily unreasonable, depending on which provider that is. Sites like Wikipedia also block entire ranges to prevent spam. Unfortunately sometimes people do get caught up in that (as I did last year).
  - panki27 3y ago
    Even if you get them to create an exception for your IP, personal experience shows that this lasts for 2 months tops, then you're blocked again. I gave up, getting my personal mail server to communicate with Outlook is not worth it.
  - smcl 3y ago
    Didn’t the Wikipedia one just block anonymous contributions from some ip range? As in, you could still sign up, login and contribute?
    - arp242 3y ago
      No; was blocked even when logged in. Had to create a ticket to unblock (IP range had been re-assigned, which is why I got blocked after I moved).
- supermatt 3y ago
  What whitelist are you referring to?
- account42 3y ago
  Same experience. Thankfully I am in a position where I can just tell Microsoft mail users use a different provider or pound sand.
charcircuit 3y ago
[flagged]
- pembrook 3y ago
  The vast majority of spam these days now originates from Outlook and Gmail accounts. Yet, nobody has the power or would dare to block them. This is not so black and white as you say.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    The ratio of spam to legitimate emails and the amount of effort the company puts into stopping spam matters.
treyfitty 3y ago
Maybe Tutanota.com has a lot of outlook users reporting your marketing emails as spam. I generally do this if the unsubscribe route is too painful, or even if it takes too long to load.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  It is good practise. You should never use the unsubscribe function as it tells sender the account receives is actually in use and valid. Thus they will sell your email to even more spammers.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Yeah no. Emails which include an unsubscribe link are legit enough to not do that. Actual spammers don't bother to include an unsubscribe link.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Are you sure that 100% of companies have not sold unsubscribed users information? As if there is even single counter-example you should just automatically mark it spam and then email providers should blacklist the domain.
      - arp242 3y ago
        That hugely draconian. Are you 100% sure you never just signed up for a newsletter and forgot about it? Are you 100% sure your email didn't end up there in some other way? I used to send out some newsletters for my website; just a programming blog thingy. It was just a form with a simple program on the server to collect email addresses. Wrote everything myself; no external service or whatnot involved. I got some pretty aggressive replies about people who insisted that I was spamming them. Did they forget (I didn't send out the newsletter very often)? Did someone typo their email and end up at the wrong person? Did some bot maybe fill in the form and pass the little captcha I added? Who knows. All I know is that there was a legit POST /subscribe request. And as someone who also worked with spam prevention: it's this kind of stuff that also makes legit spam detection harder than it needs to be. The "Report spam" button is not a "fuck you" button, but unfortunately many people seem to use it as such.
dathinab 3y ago
This is just that last of many cases of MS Outlook acting in an intentional power abusive market distorting way. I do not know about tutanota and if they are a bad actor in the email space. But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...). Like consider Google banning all Azure hosted mail providers independent of their reputation and DMARK,DKIM,SPF etc. because MS keeps with the law and doesn't give Google private customer information, it's that ridiculous.
- peblos 3y ago
  Tuta are a privacy focussed and pretty responsible mail service. They have quite strict sending limits to dissuade bulk mailers and keep the service free for those who need it. Whatever the cause, I’d be surprised if bad mail is sent in enough volumes to be noticeable to MS
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  > But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...). All companies cover by GDPR (or similar privacy laws) would have this requirement. Can't be handling out information on customers to random companies willynilly.
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  i installed MIAB like 3 years ago. had this exact same problem with outlook at the time. did the same and never have had any more problems. last year i helped someone install miab and somehow neither gmail nor outlook nor any "major" provider logged them as spam from the get go. i was truly impressed and surprised. i have heard war stories about people self hosting email and having problems. sure 3-5-10 years ago that might have been the case but not now for the most part. please give your self hosted email a try again. it will take you less time to set everything up than cooking dinner. try using miab or similar email software. go cheap, like racknerd or something and save money from vultr/DO.
ChrisRR 3y ago
If you give people free web services they're going to use it for spam, porn, file sharing or crypto mining. If even their most basic tier only cost a few quid a year, it would probably stop spam usage by 99%
- arp242 3y ago
  > If even their most basic tier only cost a few quid a year, it would probably stop spam usage by 99% Not really; they will just sign up. Probably using a stolen card (I assume? I have no way to check.) Source: have worked for email provider. Have you seen one of those films where one guy fends off hordes of zombies or other "bad guys"? It's like that. Anything that can send email will attract hordes of twats trying to spam the shit out of it. The main difference is that the spammers are more despicable subhuman twats.
  - ChrisRR 3y ago
    Yes but I've also seen enough scam investigation videos where they just create email addresses and phone numbers non-stop using free services just because there's no penalty for doing so. If creating a new email cost them £3 a time then they'd probably just move onto someone else's free service.
- nicce 3y ago
  Are you saying this does not apply for free Gmail or Outlook as well? Because those should be then blocked too.
Ekaros 3y ago
So what fraction of send mail do the actual end receivers consider spam? And why would there not be some reasonable threshold. Or should we entirely instead ban spam filtering?
geff82 3y ago
I have an outlook.com account, too and having a look at the Spam-folder is as important as looking at the Inbox. Too many important mails get missing with outlook
- eddyg 3y ago
  Because WAY too many people use the “Report Spam” button on emails that are not actually “spam”. Gmail has the exact same problem.
- account42 3y ago
  Worse, too many emails don't even get delived to Spam by Microsoft. Being able to tell people to check their spam folder would be a blessing.
stareatgoats 3y ago
Looking at the correspondence cited in the article I expect this is because the "AI"-powered anti-spam detection is hallucinating, and have decided every email from this provider is spam, based on a few (or many as the case may be) bad apples.
privacyking 3y ago
This sort of email oligopoly/mafia problem can only really be solved with legislation. There needs to be push from within the EU to legislate this hopeless situation.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  How is legislation the only answer? Users can just stop using Outlookif they care that MS is blocking providers. If users don't care and stay on Outlook, why bother legislating it?
  - acdha 3y ago
    Ah, yes, a school student can just call their IT department and tell them to switch providers.
  - boesboes 3y ago
    First: Most users don't care. From their perspective, its' always the senders fault/problem. And the burden is always on the sender to prove it was actually outlook that dropped the email etc. Second: corporate & institutional users have no choice
hannofcart 3y ago
Recently, I managed to get my personal mail server working and delivering to Outlook. Of all the major mail providers, I found getting my mails to Outlook the hardest. Gmail played nice once I setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF, MTA-STS, rDNS and a couple more things that I forgot setup exactly the way they like it. Outlook was harder though. I had to send a series of mails spread over multiple days to people who had Outlook accounts and get them to both mark it as not spam and reply to the mail until it eventually started working. It's been a couple of months, not sure if it still works though. Hope it does.
- zahllos 3y ago
  Outlook are a pain. If you don't regularly send email to outlook.com they forget your IP and start responding with 550s. I have a daily message sent out from my server to a test account at outlook.com for two reasons: to try to work around this behaviour and to know immediately when there is a delivery issue.
  - sbuk 3y ago
    > Outlook are a pain. If you don't regularly send email to outlook.com they forget your IP and start responding with 550s. All providers should be doing that. Most will remove IPs/domains after 90-120 days.
    - zahllos 3y ago
      Disagree. They can do what they want with the email once it is in their queue but bouncing 'unknown' IPs is an extreme choice especially when they have SPF/dkim/dmarc/mta-sts/... all set up, and are not on any spam lists, and are hosted in a reputable data centre. SMTP 550 means the email bounces. The sender knows but unless they're also the admin they can't do anything about it. The recipient knows nothing. In the most recent case that happened to me, it happened when I sent a reply to an @outlook I had just received a message from (and was regularly receiving emails from, but only rarely needed to reply).
globalnode 3y ago
didnt know tutanota even existed, they just got a new sign up from me tho.
glietu 3y ago
MS outlook.com also blocks emails from apple.com as spam What's worse - often times emails sent out from an old hotmail/outlook.com account always end up in recipient's junk/spam folder. They still haven't addressed [this](https://x.com/tvjames/status/1278813439222145024?s=20 https://x.com/tvjames/status/1278813439222145024?s=20), it seems, even to this very day.
lkramer 3y ago
Another German email provider, GMX seems to have the same issue at the moment too.
albertzeyer 3y ago
GMail also blocks mails from google.com as spam. :P I needed to add a special filter to not move those mails to spam.
_cenw 3y ago
most of the phishing emails bypassing my spam filters (on Fastmail) recently have been from prod.outlook.com it's almost impossible to figure out where to report spam; most of their support articles are about how you report spam in Outlook instead. For reference, those reporting emails are: phish@office365.microsoft.com junk@office365.microsoft.com but you get zero feedback, and I keep getting repeat phishing too they care so little about cleaning up their own act, i'm considering just rejecting their stuff with a bounce message. i checked, and there's very little important traffic from prod.outlook.com arriving in my inbox.
- borg16 3y ago
  my money is on the side that there's no team looking into those email lists actively.
PedroBatista 3y ago
To be fair, Hotmail / Outlook is known to be the worst of the worst when it comes to accepting emails. Even a spotlessly configured MTA will not guarantee you anything.
- ZWoz 3y ago
  Putting on my "postmaster at shared hosting company" hat: Used to be. Gmail is done lot of work to be worse than Outlook. At least MS idiosyncraties are somewhat known and stable. I would say that most customer complaints are related to gmail.
  - account42 3y ago
    FWIW that has not been my experience with hosting my own personal mail. The only deliverability issue I had with Gmail was with a newly registered domain and even then they did at least deliver the mails to the spam folder (and soon enough directly to the inbox) which is much more than Microsoft does.
    - rstuart4133 3y ago
      I host my own email too. +1.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    I have a small sample size but for my SaaS which primarily sends email GMail marked as spam for a while but then gained domain trust and it hasn't been a notable issue. Outlook has my IP on a blacklist and doesn't even consider anything else. I need to send via relays to get an IP that is trusted enough for Outlook to even consider my message (which is signed with DKIM + SPF with a DMARC reject policy)
ranting-moth 3y ago
I'd be surprised. I don't think Microsoft has ever abused its power.
Distilitron 3y ago
[flagged]
pulse7 3y ago
Microsoft may be using AI for spam detection and... is - of course - unable to fix it, because you can not debug a neural network (or may need months/years to debug and fix it)... So: WELCOME TO THE NEW WONDERFUL WORLD OF AI where we will not be able to fix things...
- stareatgoats 3y ago
  I think this is it, too. AI is efficient, but malfunctioning a fair percentage of the time. Are we going to have to accept it just because it has a number of upsides - or are we to demand that errors be brought to 0 before using it on critical systems, like email? Or in critical situations like war for that matter.
dutchbrit 3y ago
I'd be pissed off if I were an Outlook user - it's a shame that big tech get treated as the "gold standard" - I get that spam prevention is important but it shouldn't hurt your business. Their support is below standards. I wonder how many opportunities Outlook businesses lose because they don't receive certain emails. That being said, email as a whole could do with being replaced with a more robust solution to make it more versatile and offer other spam prevention techniques.
- account42 3y ago
  The sad part is that this kind of behavior might actually be optimal for Microsoft. Most people won't even see the issue (as senders work around it) or blame the sender wheres they will start screeching if they so much as have to see a spam mail once in a while.
tonmoy 3y ago
Little OT, I was using Hotmail in 2015 to apply to grad schools. I got an email about interview from a professor with @vt.edu address that got flagged into spam. I noticed only after someone else got selected for funding. To this day I don’t understand why an email written by a professor from a reputable university domain was flagged as spam, but I have definitely stopped using Hotmail
apeters 3y ago
Hey, mailcow founder here! That’s one of the reasons I stopped working on hosted mail. It has not turned to anything better with big companies putting their hands over it. It’s more controlled now but the same crap as before, just as dangerous and a bit more expensive. Currently working on a system with as much control as possible but piggybacking existing providers' transports.
- 3np 3y ago
  Something like Delta Chat?
- quags 3y ago
  Love mailcow I moved off exchange to mailcow. I’ve used email for I guess 30 years now and every year it’s less reliable. My kids do not use email at all , they are on the internet with out actually using email. Sure they have a google account for YouTube but their services tend to allow a sign up with out an email. I can see a future where it continues to be less of a thing and turn into something held on by older people.
  - apeters 3y ago
    Thanks for your comment! :) Nice to see you like(d) it. Yes, sadly it gets worse, perhaps not even in bad faith but by trying to fix it.
pluc 3y ago
Hah! My bank did this too before I went on a trip - it blocks Interac transfer requests from Wise, and will hold your outgoing transfers until you call to validate, calling it fraud. Gotta love using your own anti-abuse processes to stifle competition, as little impact as it may have.
- gorlilla 3y ago
  Ugh, we contacted Chase since we were going on an 'out-of-the-ordinary' road trip.spoke with fraud dept and gave them our travel itinerary, hoping to prevent cards from being frozen while we were in questionable cell coverage areas. Everything went fine until the last gas stop before arriving to our destination... only to find our cards frozen anyhow. It took about 25 mins to get cleared up, but these big corps are so heavily dependent on automation, they can't deviate because the system will take its own actions anyhow. I, for one, am tired of living in a society that somehow isn't able to routinely think/behave proactively rather than reacting only once "the system will let you".
boesboes 3y ago
I wouldn't mind these providers being aggressive with spam filtering IF they would just bounce the messages so i know WHY. I've had so many cases where an 'email wasn't sent' by our systems and then the logs show it was accepted by outlook.com for delivery, but never even showed up in the spam folder (apparently, if customers are to be trusted). Many providers seems to do this, respond everything ok and then drop the message silently..
- varispeed 3y ago
  That actually should be illegal practice. But it is very unlikely regulators will ever catch up with that. It's better for governments to have just a few big email providers, so authorities have easier life if they need to snoop on someone.
  - pas 3y ago
    we shall see. the EU is not really incentivized to help Big Tech, since they want to protect small(er) businesses in the EU.
- wiredfool 3y ago
  Been there, done that. This is be a nightmare, mainly for back scatter from spam runs. You can’t control who sends email that looks like it’s from you. If your email were bounced because of a spf or dkim failure, you could get an unlimited number of emails.
theyeenzbeanz 3y ago
Microsoft is real good at prioritizing blatant spam emails to in my inbox and constantly moving to junk or never receiving important and legit emails.
AniseAbyss 3y ago
[dead]
butz 3y ago
With most spam coming from Outlook accounts I'd say they should first start fixing spam problem at their own end.
t0bia_s 3y ago
Seznam.cz blocked all emails contained links from OneDrive recently.
ivanjermakov 3y ago
Mimecast for Outlook is blocking (reporting as phishing...) Jira notifications from one specific coworker and I can't turn it off. I hate everything about M$ so damn much.
billpg 3y ago
Good. That's half way to my ideal way to deal with email. 1. Emails from everyone (including you) go into the spam folder. 2. I identify senders I do actually want to receive messages from. The industry isn't doing item 2 very well, but default-deny for new senders is exactly what I want from a mailbox service.
locust495 3y ago
maybe it is because of the leak made in Ontario Superior Court by a former RCMP official about Tuta helping intelligence agencies

227 points by grammers 3y ago

anti competitive!

My private email server gets completly blocked on regular bases. They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider. You get no response from them whatsoever. You have to fill out a form und wait a couple of days. You can however sign up for a 200$ whitelist... from a different company owned by guess who.

reiichiroh 3y ago
What third party?
literalAardvark 3y ago
I would assume any provider that allows you to send email also allows a great deal of spam, so this might not be unwarranted. My provider is also frequently blacklisted, I just don't use it to send mail anymore.
- jonathanstrange 3y ago
  What the original poster describes is anti-competitive behavior, for this reason alone the idea of blocking the whole IP range of a competing email service provider is very bad. Personally, I wouldn't use an email provider that blocks spam server-side without an option to turn this off because these filters often block legitimate mails and can cause all kinds of annoying problems.
  - literalAardvark 3y ago
    Kind of, but parent poster was talking about his own small server, which is likely hosted on a residential IP pool that's pretty much guaranteed to be blocked all the time. All mail providers mass block IPs, because the spam from some ISPs is literally too much to even filter. I run a few high volume (very legitimate) servers and it's been a huge pain in the butt to keep them off of blacklists, but at the same time we've also had spammer problems and I totally get it.
petemir 3y ago
I worked for a company that sent travel deals newsletters everyday. Deliverability to (then) Hotmail was abysmal. We then got the recommendation of a company (cannot remember their name) that could analyse our IPs and give recommendations. Naturally, the recommendations were the ones that you could find everywhere so they were not useful, but the company did have access to MSFT's score of our IPs, so we could know when we were close to being blacklisted and could take action/ramp down/etc. How did they have access to those internal IP scores? I don't know, but it seems totally fishy :). For sure we spent 5k+ USD yearly in this service (which is a huge amount of money in a 3rd. world country), and "somehow" after paying our deliverability did improve, despite doing the same things as before, as the recommendations were not ingenious. So yeah, e-mail deliverability is a mafia, for sure.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Was it "Return Path"? If so, yes, they are just a racket. They ostensibly provide consulting services on this stuff, but in reality they have a (exclusive?) deal with Microsoft to change scores and allowlist, so you just pay them and they get your email through. Pricing is based on volume of email, I think we were paying $10k/yr for our emails to get to Microsoft hosted addresses.
  - petemir 3y ago
    I cannot 100% confirm it but "Return Path" (now Validity) definitely rings a loud bell :), and the figure is also in the ballpark -- we definitely started to send less e-mails just to be able to afford/test them. I felt outraged at the moment because it was clearly a "pay-to-play" scheme, but ~8 years ago the number of Hotmail/Outlook addresses in my country was definitely substantial. Probably it still is.
- ksjskskskkk 3y ago
  sounds like you paid to have their spam filter look the other way for your ips
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  How did they have access to those internal IP scores? When I was doing DMARC stuff professionally, plenty of big names were willing to send DMARC reports our way. Microsoft was the only company to give us full text.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
arp242 3y ago
> They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider. That's not necessarily unreasonable, depending on which provider that is. Sites like Wikipedia also block entire ranges to prevent spam. Unfortunately sometimes people do get caught up in that (as I did last year).
- panki27 3y ago
  Even if you get them to create an exception for your IP, personal experience shows that this lasts for 2 months tops, then you're blocked again. I gave up, getting my personal mail server to communicate with Outlook is not worth it.
- smcl 3y ago
  Didn’t the Wikipedia one just block anonymous contributions from some ip range? As in, you could still sign up, login and contribute?
  - arp242 3y ago
    No; was blocked even when logged in. Had to create a ticket to unblock (IP range had been re-assigned, which is why I got blocked after I moved).
supermatt 3y ago
What whitelist are you referring to?
account42 3y ago
Same experience. Thankfully I am in a position where I can just tell Microsoft mail users use a different provider or pound sand.

charcircuit 3y ago

[flagged]

pembrook 3y ago
The vast majority of spam these days now originates from Outlook and Gmail accounts. Yet, nobody has the power or would dare to block them. This is not so black and white as you say.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  The ratio of spam to legitimate emails and the amount of effort the company puts into stopping spam matters.

treyfitty 3y ago

Maybe Tutanota.com has a lot of outlook users reporting your marketing emails as spam. I generally do this if the unsubscribe route is too painful, or even if it takes too long to load.

Ekaros 3y ago
It is good practise. You should never use the unsubscribe function as it tells sender the account receives is actually in use and valid. Thus they will sell your email to even more spammers.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Yeah no. Emails which include an unsubscribe link are legit enough to not do that. Actual spammers don't bother to include an unsubscribe link.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Are you sure that 100% of companies have not sold unsubscribed users information? As if there is even single counter-example you should just automatically mark it spam and then email providers should blacklist the domain.
    - arp242 3y ago
      That hugely draconian. Are you 100% sure you never just signed up for a newsletter and forgot about it? Are you 100% sure your email didn't end up there in some other way? I used to send out some newsletters for my website; just a programming blog thingy. It was just a form with a simple program on the server to collect email addresses. Wrote everything myself; no external service or whatnot involved. I got some pretty aggressive replies about people who insisted that I was spamming them. Did they forget (I didn't send out the newsletter very often)? Did someone typo their email and end up at the wrong person? Did some bot maybe fill in the form and pass the little captcha I added? Who knows. All I know is that there was a legit POST /subscribe request. And as someone who also worked with spam prevention: it's this kind of stuff that also makes legit spam detection harder than it needs to be. The "Report spam" button is not a "fuck you" button, but unfortunately many people seem to use it as such.

dathinab 3y ago

This is just that last of many cases of MS Outlook acting in an intentional power abusive market distorting way. I do not know about tutanota and if they are a bad actor in the email space. But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...). Like consider Google banning all Azure hosted mail providers independent of their reputation and DMARK,DKIM,SPF etc. because MS keeps with the law and doesn't give Google private customer information, it's that ridiculous.

peblos 3y ago
Tuta are a privacy focussed and pretty responsible mail service. They have quite strict sending limits to dissuade bulk mailers and keep the service free for those who need it. Whatever the cause, I’d be surprised if bad mail is sent in enough volumes to be noticeable to MS
that_guy_iain 3y ago
> But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...). All companies cover by GDPR (or similar privacy laws) would have this requirement. Can't be handling out information on customers to random companies willynilly.
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
i installed MIAB like 3 years ago. had this exact same problem with outlook at the time. did the same and never have had any more problems. last year i helped someone install miab and somehow neither gmail nor outlook nor any "major" provider logged them as spam from the get go. i was truly impressed and surprised. i have heard war stories about people self hosting email and having problems. sure 3-5-10 years ago that might have been the case but not now for the most part. please give your self hosted email a try again. it will take you less time to set everything up than cooking dinner. try using miab or similar email software. go cheap, like racknerd or something and save money from vultr/DO.

ChrisRR 3y ago

If you give people free web services they're going to use it for spam, porn, file sharing or crypto mining. If even their most basic tier only cost a few quid a year, it would probably stop spam usage by 99%

arp242 3y ago
> If even their most basic tier only cost a few quid a year, it would probably stop spam usage by 99% Not really; they will just sign up. Probably using a stolen card (I assume? I have no way to check.) Source: have worked for email provider. Have you seen one of those films where one guy fends off hordes of zombies or other "bad guys"? It's like that. Anything that can send email will attract hordes of twats trying to spam the shit out of it. The main difference is that the spammers are more despicable subhuman twats.
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  Yes but I've also seen enough scam investigation videos where they just create email addresses and phone numbers non-stop using free services just because there's no penalty for doing so. If creating a new email cost them £3 a time then they'd probably just move onto someone else's free service.
nicce 3y ago
Are you saying this does not apply for free Gmail or Outlook as well? Because those should be then blocked too.

Ekaros 3y ago

So what fraction of send mail do the actual end receivers consider spam? And why would there not be some reasonable threshold. Or should we entirely instead ban spam filtering?

geff82 3y ago

I have an outlook.com account, too and having a look at the Spam-folder is as important as looking at the Inbox. Too many important mails get missing with outlook

eddyg 3y ago
Because WAY too many people use the “Report Spam” button on emails that are not actually “spam”. Gmail has the exact same problem.
account42 3y ago
Worse, too many emails don't even get delived to Spam by Microsoft. Being able to tell people to check their spam folder would be a blessing.

stareatgoats 3y ago

Looking at the correspondence cited in the article I expect this is because the "AI"-powered anti-spam detection is hallucinating, and have decided every email from this provider is spam, based on a few (or many as the case may be) bad apples.

privacyking 3y ago

This sort of email oligopoly/mafia problem can only really be solved with legislation. There needs to be push from within the EU to legislate this hopeless situation.

_heimdall 3y ago
How is legislation the only answer? Users can just stop using Outlookif they care that MS is blocking providers. If users don't care and stay on Outlook, why bother legislating it?
- acdha 3y ago
  Ah, yes, a school student can just call their IT department and tell them to switch providers.
- boesboes 3y ago
  First: Most users don't care. From their perspective, its' always the senders fault/problem. And the burden is always on the sender to prove it was actually outlook that dropped the email etc. Second: corporate & institutional users have no choice

hannofcart 3y ago

Recently, I managed to get my personal mail server working and delivering to Outlook. Of all the major mail providers, I found getting my mails to Outlook the hardest. Gmail played nice once I setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF, MTA-STS, rDNS and a couple more things that I forgot setup exactly the way they like it. Outlook was harder though. I had to send a series of mails spread over multiple days to people who had Outlook accounts and get them to both mark it as not spam and reply to the mail until it eventually started working. It's been a couple of months, not sure if it still works though. Hope it does.

zahllos 3y ago
Outlook are a pain. If you don't regularly send email to outlook.com they forget your IP and start responding with 550s. I have a daily message sent out from my server to a test account at outlook.com for two reasons: to try to work around this behaviour and to know immediately when there is a delivery issue.
- sbuk 3y ago
  > Outlook are a pain. If you don't regularly send email to outlook.com they forget your IP and start responding with 550s. All providers should be doing that. Most will remove IPs/domains after 90-120 days.
  - zahllos 3y ago
    Disagree. They can do what they want with the email once it is in their queue but bouncing 'unknown' IPs is an extreme choice especially when they have SPF/dkim/dmarc/mta-sts/... all set up, and are not on any spam lists, and are hosted in a reputable data centre. SMTP 550 means the email bounces. The sender knows but unless they're also the admin they can't do anything about it. The recipient knows nothing. In the most recent case that happened to me, it happened when I sent a reply to an @outlook I had just received a message from (and was regularly receiving emails from, but only rarely needed to reply).

globalnode 3y ago

didnt know tutanota even existed, they just got a new sign up from me tho.

glietu 3y ago

MS outlook.com also blocks emails from apple.com as spam What's worse - often times emails sent out from an old hotmail/outlook.com account always end up in recipient's junk/spam folder. They still haven't addressed [this](https://x.com/tvjames/status/1278813439222145024?s=20 https://x.com/tvjames/status/1278813439222145024?s=20), it seems, even to this very day.

lkramer 3y ago

Another German email provider, GMX seems to have the same issue at the moment too.

albertzeyer 3y ago

GMail also blocks mails from google.com as spam. :P I needed to add a special filter to not move those mails to spam.

_cenw 3y ago

most of the phishing emails bypassing my spam filters (on Fastmail) recently have been from prod.outlook.com it's almost impossible to figure out where to report spam; most of their support articles are about how you report spam in Outlook instead. For reference, those reporting emails are: phish@office365.microsoft.com junk@office365.microsoft.com but you get zero feedback, and I keep getting repeat phishing too they care so little about cleaning up their own act, i'm considering just rejecting their stuff with a bounce message. i checked, and there's very little important traffic from prod.outlook.com arriving in my inbox.

borg16 3y ago
my money is on the side that there's no team looking into those email lists actively.

PedroBatista 3y ago

To be fair, Hotmail / Outlook is known to be the worst of the worst when it comes to accepting emails. Even a spotlessly configured MTA will not guarantee you anything.

ZWoz 3y ago
Putting on my "postmaster at shared hosting company" hat: Used to be. Gmail is done lot of work to be worse than Outlook. At least MS idiosyncraties are somewhat known and stable. I would say that most customer complaints are related to gmail.
- account42 3y ago
  FWIW that has not been my experience with hosting my own personal mail. The only deliverability issue I had with Gmail was with a newly registered domain and even then they did at least deliver the mails to the spam folder (and soon enough directly to the inbox) which is much more than Microsoft does.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    I host my own email too. +1.
- kevincox 3y ago
  I have a small sample size but for my SaaS which primarily sends email GMail marked as spam for a while but then gained domain trust and it hasn't been a notable issue. Outlook has my IP on a blacklist and doesn't even consider anything else. I need to send via relays to get an IP that is trusted enough for Outlook to even consider my message (which is signed with DKIM + SPF with a DMARC reject policy)

ranting-moth 3y ago

I'd be surprised. I don't think Microsoft has ever abused its power.

Distilitron 3y ago

[flagged]

pulse7 3y ago

Microsoft may be using AI for spam detection and... is - of course - unable to fix it, because you can not debug a neural network (or may need months/years to debug and fix it)... So: WELCOME TO THE NEW WONDERFUL WORLD OF AI where we will not be able to fix things...

stareatgoats 3y ago
I think this is it, too. AI is efficient, but malfunctioning a fair percentage of the time. Are we going to have to accept it just because it has a number of upsides - or are we to demand that errors be brought to 0 before using it on critical systems, like email? Or in critical situations like war for that matter.

dutchbrit 3y ago

I'd be pissed off if I were an Outlook user - it's a shame that big tech get treated as the "gold standard" - I get that spam prevention is important but it shouldn't hurt your business. Their support is below standards. I wonder how many opportunities Outlook businesses lose because they don't receive certain emails. That being said, email as a whole could do with being replaced with a more robust solution to make it more versatile and offer other spam prevention techniques.

account42 3y ago
The sad part is that this kind of behavior might actually be optimal for Microsoft. Most people won't even see the issue (as senders work around it) or blame the sender wheres they will start screeching if they so much as have to see a spam mail once in a while.

tonmoy 3y ago

Little OT, I was using Hotmail in 2015 to apply to grad schools. I got an email about interview from a professor with @vt.edu address that got flagged into spam. I noticed only after someone else got selected for funding. To this day I don’t understand why an email written by a professor from a reputable university domain was flagged as spam, but I have definitely stopped using Hotmail

apeters 3y ago

Hey, mailcow founder here! That’s one of the reasons I stopped working on hosted mail. It has not turned to anything better with big companies putting their hands over it. It’s more controlled now but the same crap as before, just as dangerous and a bit more expensive. Currently working on a system with as much control as possible but piggybacking existing providers' transports.

3np 3y ago
Something like Delta Chat?
quags 3y ago
Love mailcow I moved off exchange to mailcow. I’ve used email for I guess 30 years now and every year it’s less reliable. My kids do not use email at all , they are on the internet with out actually using email. Sure they have a google account for YouTube but their services tend to allow a sign up with out an email. I can see a future where it continues to be less of a thing and turn into something held on by older people.
- apeters 3y ago
  Thanks for your comment! :) Nice to see you like(d) it. Yes, sadly it gets worse, perhaps not even in bad faith but by trying to fix it.

pluc 3y ago

Hah! My bank did this too before I went on a trip - it blocks Interac transfer requests from Wise, and will hold your outgoing transfers until you call to validate, calling it fraud. Gotta love using your own anti-abuse processes to stifle competition, as little impact as it may have.

gorlilla 3y ago
Ugh, we contacted Chase since we were going on an 'out-of-the-ordinary' road trip.spoke with fraud dept and gave them our travel itinerary, hoping to prevent cards from being frozen while we were in questionable cell coverage areas. Everything went fine until the last gas stop before arriving to our destination... only to find our cards frozen anyhow. It took about 25 mins to get cleared up, but these big corps are so heavily dependent on automation, they can't deviate because the system will take its own actions anyhow. I, for one, am tired of living in a society that somehow isn't able to routinely think/behave proactively rather than reacting only once "the system will let you".

boesboes 3y ago

I wouldn't mind these providers being aggressive with spam filtering IF they would just bounce the messages so i know WHY. I've had so many cases where an 'email wasn't sent' by our systems and then the logs show it was accepted by outlook.com for delivery, but never even showed up in the spam folder (apparently, if customers are to be trusted). Many providers seems to do this, respond everything ok and then drop the message silently..

varispeed 3y ago
That actually should be illegal practice. But it is very unlikely regulators will ever catch up with that. It's better for governments to have just a few big email providers, so authorities have easier life if they need to snoop on someone.
- pas 3y ago
  we shall see. the EU is not really incentivized to help Big Tech, since they want to protect small(er) businesses in the EU.
wiredfool 3y ago
Been there, done that. This is be a nightmare, mainly for back scatter from spam runs. You can’t control who sends email that looks like it’s from you. If your email were bounced because of a spf or dkim failure, you could get an unlimited number of emails.

theyeenzbeanz 3y ago

Microsoft is real good at prioritizing blatant spam emails to in my inbox and constantly moving to junk or never receiving important and legit emails.

AniseAbyss 3y ago

[dead]

butz 3y ago

With most spam coming from Outlook accounts I'd say they should first start fixing spam problem at their own end.

t0bia_s 3y ago

Seznam.cz blocked all emails contained links from OneDrive recently.

ivanjermakov 3y ago

Mimecast for Outlook is blocking (reporting as phishing...) Jira notifications from one specific coworker and I can't turn it off. I hate everything about M$ so damn much.

billpg 3y ago

Good. That's half way to my ideal way to deal with email. 1. Emails from everyone (including you) go into the spam folder. 2. I identify senders I do actually want to receive messages from. The industry isn't doing item 2 very well, but default-deny for new senders is exactly what I want from a mailbox service.

locust495 3y ago

maybe it is because of the leak made in Ontario Superior Court by a former RCMP official about Tuta helping intelligence agencies