[Leaplist] John Simpson Re: Hotmail

[Chris]

John Simpson wrote:

> On 2008-02-06, at 1838, Andy Lino wrote:
>
>>
>> Please email me about the Ham Radio club.
>>
>> I tried to e-mail you at the address on the card you gave me on  
>> Saturday. The e-mail address on the card bounced 3 times.
>
>
> yeah... hotmail has a bad habit of allowing spammers to use their  
> network, and the spammers end up automatically blacklisting hotmail's  
> servers. see http://www.dont-spam.us/ for more info about my 
> automatic  blacklist.

Heh - Hotmail does better than that going the other direction.
I have a friend who wanted offsite backups for his database, so
I set up a nightly cron job to backup, gzip and attach a dump of
his Postgresql database to his Hotmail account. He called me
after a week to say he only got a few backups. I set up a Yahoo
account for him and added a line to the script that does the
backup to also send a copy to his Yahoo account.

The result? He gets every backup email on his Yahoo account, but
Hotmail tosses about three out of ten, for no reason that I can
determine. No bounce message, no connect error, no timeout,
nothing in the mail log (I run his email server). Hotmail just
arbitrarily tosses some of the emails.

It's not an attachment  size issue - at 3.9 mb, it's not even close
to the limit.

It's not a mailbox full issue as my friend is only using a
fraction of his Hotmail storage.

As a last ditch effort to figure out the problem, I modified
the backup script one more time - this time, I stored one of
the backups, and changed the script to send out the same
identical attachment, with the same subject line, and the
same file name every night, eliminating every possible
difference. (The real backups went to my friend's Yahoo
account). And Hotmail still randomly tossed them.

The end result? My friend migrated to Yahoo. Of course,
the irony there is that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo.
I'm sure they can make it run just as well as they did
Hotmail.

The take home message? Don't dump Hotmail because it's
Microsoft - dump it because it stinks like last week's fish.

Cheers,

Chris