[Leaplist] John Simpson Re: Hotmail

[Sun State Martial Arts]

Chris wrote:
> 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
>
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Interesting story.  I had suspected as much back when I was using 
hotmail, and still today with friends and associates who use it still 
that it would randomly drop e-mails, but that is a bit more proof then I 
was willing to deal with gathering.

Thank you.

-- 
Raymond L. Brunkow
5th Degree Black Belt
Chief Instructor and Owner
Sun State Martial Arts LLC.
(407) 786-2525
ssma at ssma.us
http://www.ssma.us