A note on emails from TBP

If you have an email address in one of the following domains:

@outlook.com
@hotmail.com
@live.com
@msn.com
@passport.com
@passport.net

…TBP can no longer send you updates by email. So if you subscribe to comment notifications and stuff like that with an email in one of those domains, you won’t get the updates unless and until Microsoft decides to take our mail server off of their block list.

Email servers getting stuck on blocklists is a normal thing. It happens all the time. All it takes is for a few numbskulls to subscribe to some kind of email notification and then sometime later decide they don’t want to get them anymore but instead of unsubscribing, they click a button that calls the email “spam”. If more than a few people do this within a short period of time, then the email server that sent the emails gets stuck on a blocklist.

One of the things I periodically have to do is email the postmasters on the services that maintain and use these blocklists and politely describe the type of emails our server is sending out and ask them to pretty please unblock the IP address of our server. Usually one email is all it takes.

Microsoft’s response to my email this morning looked like this:

Dear Postmaster

We have completed reviewing the IP(s) you submitted. The following table contains the results of our investigation.

native advertising

Not qualified for mitigation
XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Our investigation has determined that the above IP(s) do not qualify for mitigation.

Translated, they are telling me that they aren’t going to take our email server’s IP address off their blocklist.

So if you have an email in one of those domains above, you may want to: A. let them know that you don’t appreciate their censorship – especially if you happen to be paying them; and B. boycott them and get an email address with another provider that combats spam in a better way.

I’m not much of a Google fan, but gmail manages to handle a few metric shit-tons more email than all of Microsoft’s various email services combined. As far as I know, their methods of combating spam are far more effective and yet they do what they do without relying on system-wide blocklists. Instead they push the spam filtration down to the individual user level. You know, one man’s spam is another man’s treasure.

I’ve never once had to try to remediate sending emails to an @gmail address. I guess that’s because they want as much stuff they can spy on to hit your inbox as possible.

Anyway, sorry I don’t have recommendations about good email providers, but here are some recommendations about ones to stay away from: Microsoft (including all the domains listed above); any company that provides home Internet access like comcast, roadrunner, bigpond, xfinity, AT&T, century link, verizon, optonline, etc.

Sorry for the bad news.

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