Admins accuse Microsoft of Draconian Hotmail capLife can be tough when you're one of the globe's biggest email providers. Just ask Hotmail. Users get upset enough when come-ons for Viagra slip through the cracks of the Microsoft-owned service. But there's just as much hell to pay when its war on spam snuffs out legitimate emails.
In May, we reported on a proprietary Microsoft technology dubbed SmartScreen, which secretly blocked Hotmail-destined email from entire domains - even when they were a year or more old and were correctly listed in the DNS and had solid SPF records.
Now we're fielding reader tips that Hotmail has placed Draconian limits on the number of Hotmail recipients who can receive an email. The first 10 Hotmail addresses included in a mass email go through just fine, according to these reports. But any additional addresses are returned to sender with a message that reads: "552 Too many recipients." (Microsoft denies it has placed any such restriction on the number of senders.)
That's causing considerable trouble for people like William Old, a UK-based IT administrator who maintains an email newsletter for retired police officers. After sending the most recent newsletter about two weeks ago, he quickly received the 552 notice informing him that 29 of the 39 Hotmail addressees were being returned.
"The issue for us is it's a blow to a well established mechanism for getting an update out to our 550 members," Old says. "It was working perfectly well up until the last month."
Old has since sent several batches of test emails, and each time, exactly 10 are delivered to addresses ending in hotmail.com or msn.com and the rest are rejected with the same 552 failure notice.
It took Microsoft's rapid response team more than 19 hours to provide a three-sentence response to our request for comment. It read:
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