Re: [tlug] Making sure people get the message

["Michael(tm) Smith" <smith@example.com>]

Dave M G <martin@example.com>, 2006-09-30 22:32 +0900:

> I am involved in a few different groups which I communicate with via 
> various email methods, such as mailing lists, and mass BCC mailings.
> 
> What I've noticed more and more in recent years, is that because of ever 
> increasing anti-spam measures, there are often cases where people don't 
> receive the email I send out. That an email comes from a majordomo 
> mailing list, or is BCC'd to them seems to be a significant factor for a 
> lot of email security systems.
> 
> Hotmail is particularly bad when it comes to this, and I wish I could 
> just tell everyone who uses Hotmail to not. But I can't really do that, 
> and in any case, Hotmail is certainly not the only offender.

It's not the only one but it's probably the worst in this regard--
way too aggressive in routing messages to users' junk folders.

One thing that Hotmail seems to do is some kind of check to see if
the sending MTA is running on a machine with a dynamically
assigned IP address -- which mine often is, because I send out my
mail through an MTA running on my laptop.

That's a fundamental problem with the whole idea behind SPF also.
I run my own DNS, but with my setup, when I'm on the road,
connected to a wireless LAN or whatever, the IP address I happen
to be assigned at the time is not going to be in my SPF records.
That's a problem because I have run into some mail providers that
actually reject mail that fails an SPF check.

I know I could get around some of the issues by using SMTP instead
of sendmail, but, well, to hell with that.

Anyway, as far as the specific issue of Hotmail, I deal with that
by using my Gmail account when I need to e-mail somebody who has a
Hotmail account. It's just about the only time I ever use Gmail's
send feature -- I'm otherwise just using it for archiving (by
forwarding messages from my account on my own mail server).

  --Mike

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