Returned Hotmail emails

[grumbert]

It's called greylisting.

It's a mechanism to filter out zombie mail senders. Basically zombie pcs used for spam networks have no queueing mechanism, which means when sending out email , if they get a 451 message (temporary defer) they fail the sending and abandon that email.
This is not how regular mailservers behave. If a mailserver gets a defer, it will typically requeue the message (if this goes on for a few hours, the MTA will sometimes send out a warning saying that the email is deferred and requeued and state for how long this will go on).

What greylisting does is this: When it first receives an email from a source, it will issue a defer, but keep track of various things : sender, subject , source IP etc etc. When it sees a retry for that email, it knows it's a from a legitimate mail server and accepts the email. It will also add a few criteria to a database, so that future emails from sender, ip etc etc are accepted. Typically these entries in the database are rotated out after a set time interval.

No doubt hotmail operate a slightly more sophisticated version of this.

[The Villan]

I have had a bounce on a hotmail account. Can receive from the person, but gets bounced when I reply.

[grumbert]

Is it a bounce (ie message undeliverable) or a delay notice?

[acidtechno]

grumbert, thank you for that, very informative, it appears that is the case here.

you won't believe this but I just sent another test e-mail to my hotmail account and it arrived there in 1 second or less, I'm not kidding, as soon as I clicked send in thunderbird, I looked at my msn messenger e-mail icon, and it was there already.

[wibbleyuk]

Hi
would just like to confirm that mails sent via webmail are now getting thru to hotmail.com accounts and also mails are getting thru to yahoo.com as well, that has been so for over a week or so .....

Regards

[Frank_O]

After a brief period of success. I am no longer able to send mail to a Hotmail.co.uk account using webmail. Haven't even been able to reply to a message from Hotmail account (which I was able to do before).

Haven't tried from Outlook Express as I am at work.

Work e-mail to Hotmail works fine.

I cannot understand why this can't be sorted out...... Have tried rasing ticket with F2S but basically fobbed off saying it's Hotmail's problem. well that may be so but you would think F2S would try to help fix it.

[wibbleyuk]

Yup, was ok to hotmail, but not now !! and that is from OE ,,

[TonyJ]

Down for me again although I hadnt realised.. but have had an unsolicited mail from tech support (Brian) asking whether I had problems. Sent another set of mails to hotmail to allow them to be ?tracked? by support
Tony

[TonyJ]

Just to say that at least 1 of my test messages went through OK last night so everything OK now (or then)
Tony

[TonyJ]

My f2s account messages to Hotmail accounts have disappeared again (no bounce) but may have found the reason - see "Hotmail's antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too" at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05...friendly_fire/

Tony

[gomez]

Just done a test from FS to Hotmail which arrive fine. There is more to this than a blanket F2S mail server problem.