Hotmail Blacklist

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Is your email being blocked by Hotmail?

Check Windows Live Hotmail Postmaster for more information about Hotmail's incoming email policies.

ISP's should use this form to contact the Hotmail postmaster team.

Update: After you have fixed the problem, use the Outlook.com deliverability support page to open a ticket with Microsoft.

If you need help troubleshooting a problem sending email to Hotmail please reply below.
 
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EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
I agree, keeping an eye on your sender score and using a blacklist monitoring service can help email server operators avoid big problems by fixing spam issues before their IP reputation and ability to get email delivered is damaged.

The world figures it out quick when a sending IP has a problem. It's best to fix problems fast. An example is an smtp relay I helped to get fixed months ago but it continues to have long term issues because SORBS blocked them through August this year.
 

Roman Y

New Email
Hi all,

I just registered to this forum to get help with this issue. We have a dedicated server (single IP, hostdime) from which we are reselling domains and email services to our clients, and for some reason Hotmail has stopped receiving our emails and does not generate a bounceback or give out any error message. The server techs looked into it and they have said that all is fine from their end. Now occasionally accounts do get compromised and spam happens, and of course then our reputation goes down, but this happens even when our reputation is Neutral or spam is not going on. Now, I have used that link that Popowich provided, and I submitted my details to Hotmail, so I hope to get a reply soon. However, I recall doing this process previously but I do not remember what came out of it.

This really is bad for business as we have many clients and we mostly operate in the Middle East region, there are lots of Hotmail users here or in surrounding regions (due to Windows Live Messenger). I hope this issue can get resolved. I remember once, one our clients decided to put forwarders from their domain, from around 5-10 email accounts to his personal Hotmail account. And we don't know for how long this went on. I hope this has not ruined our reputation completely. If anyone has any suggestions for what to do in this situation, then please let me know.

Thanks.

EDIT : I got this email reply from hotmail but I don't understand it or what to do next. Any ideas?

ezblYET.png
 
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EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hi Roman,

There are a few sending IP's in that /24.

It appears your specific IP of 67.23.246.20 has a bad sender score of 55 - Sender Score | Return Path

The first step is to fix the spam problem and get that score back above a 70.

After it's fixed, open a new ticket with Microsoft explaining the problem and fix, and mention that you're only asking about your specific /32 (not the whole /24)

When you mention /24 you're indicating to Microsoft that you're referencing all of the IP addresses in 67.23.246.* and some of those have worse scores than you.
 

Roman Y

New Email
Hi Pops (Hope you dont mind),

I got another email and i saw the entire sub-net of 246.x was being referenced in the email. I realised my mistake too late it seems. What steps can be taken to get it above 70? Should I ask the hosting technicians/departments for help in sorting out this issue?

Here is the reply I got from Microsoft (wall of text in an image) : {moved to my post}
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hi Roman,

Success! In the middle of that message you'll see that they applied a conditional mitigation for your specific IP addresses:

Microosft blacklist conditionally mitigated.jpg

Who manages your server? Some common problems for the source of the spam include compromised email account credentials and hacked web sites. Do you see any suspicious messages in your mail logs?
 

Roman Y

New Email
Hi Popowich,

Well, mostly our server techs manage the server. We have access to cPanel and WHM, but I do not think that someone sits on the server 24/7. Mail logs for a specific account or the entire server? Because to be honest, I am not familiar with this or how to check them (I can check for an account in cPanel and the logs therein).

Thanks for the assistance so far!
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hi Roman,

I'm going to be offline. I forwarded this discussion to @Big Dan who can help check your mail logs if you server techs don't know what to do. He can also help with problems such as hacked Wordpress sites if that turns out to be the problem.
 

Roman Y

New Email
Hey Dan,

well, I keep checking senderscore but it's not improving. It hovers between 52-55. Senderbase still shows our rep as neutral.

Any tips on what can be done to fix this?
 
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