Mostly Harmless

If you run an email server, you may be interested to have a look at Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services tool. Providing you can authenticate yourself as the administrator of the IP address in question you can view statistics on the volume and type of email sent to hotmail / live.com / msn. This includes goodies like

Whether email from your range has been hitting the “trap addresses” (dummy accounts setup by MS to catch spammers).

What percentage of your email is being complained about within the hotmail interface

An overall result from the spam filter in place.

Better than nothing…

Unfortunately, to limit it’s use to spammers the amount of data available is relatively small. The tool only provides you with one example email that has been “complained” about per day per IP.

The sort of email that is being marked by users may be something of a surprise. We have seen the following marked as junk by users within the hotmail interface.

Order confirmations

Emails containing login details

Requested quotes for technical work (I guess the price wasn’t right…)

Perhaps to a cynic this isn’t a great surprise, it isn’t too much of a leap to define spam email as “anything I don’t want to receive”. However, it pushes the notion that some user re-education is definitely needed at hotmail and also gives the impression that some people are using mark as junk rather than the delete button.

If you operate a site or service where a lot of people will sign up with a hotmail or other free address, you might wish to reduce the number of emails you send. It is tempting to wonder if this is a sign of a change in user attitudes, it used to be the case that confirmation emails were welcomed because they could be kept as a record and were a clue that the automated form you had input data to had actually processed. However it now seems to be the case that as long as screen confirmation / tracking is provided to the user they are now finding the email notifications irrelevant? Are users trusting their web transactions much more than before? Are email newsletters now irrelevant in the age of rss feeds?

Forwarding spam is naughty (and if you use a catch all you’re going to blackhole hell)

The tool provides a spam filter result for the IP as well, if you’re doing any catch all forwarding to hotmail addresses, you’ll likely end up with a red filter result (as a catch all on an established domain will catch oodles of spam). This is somewhat depressing as users are only forwarding this email, although from the point of view of an administrator forwarded spam is still wasted bandwidth and CPU time. There is no suggestion in the FAQ as to what weighting the filter and complaint rate have in deciding blackholing although keeping the complaint rate below 0.3% is quoted as a target to aim for.

What combination of complaint rate, spam filter results and duration leads to a block or even worse the blackholing of email doesn’t seem to be public information. Anecdotal evidence (i.e from me to you, now) would seem to suggest that blackholing can be remedied by reducing the filter result (which is only common sense, if several catch alls are running up to 80-90% of your red filter figure might be spam) but I wouldn’t like to bet my salary on it.

Hotmail support seem to have difficulty with the concept of a shared hosting service where you are concerned with unblocking a server rather than a specific domain and their forms and replies are geared towards the latter. It would be helpful if there were a separate route to support through the snds interface given the authentication requirement to access data (although granted that doesn’t guarantee intelligent questions ).