Re: Problems with Hotmail deleting incoming mail

["Jansen, Morgan R." <morgan.jansen () ROSALINDFRANKLIN EDU>]

Hi Andrew,

We had a problem similar to yours and I found that hotmail was the most
difficult to deal with.  On their website I was able to find a number to
call and explain the situation.  I don't have that information anymore
because it was quite some time ago, sorry!  We were put on probation for
a week and then after some time our emails went through okay.

I was able to sign up for a program aol.com has that notifies me when
they receive messages from us that are deemed as spam.  This gives me a
nice heads up and I am able to catch most things before it gets to the
blacklist stage.  Once again it was quite some time ago so I don't
remember exactly where that information is but it should be on the
website somewhere.

I hope that helps.  Sorry that I couldn't provide more details.

Morgan Jansen
Information Technology Security Specialist
Information Technology Services

Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science
3333 Green Bay Road
North Chicago, IL 60064

phone: (847) 578-8369
morgan.jansen () rosalindfranklin edu


-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
[mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Andrew Daviel
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 3:22 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] Problems with Hotmail deleting incoming mail

A little while ago we had some compromised webmail accounts sending a
few 
thousand spams before we caught them (I since installed the squirrelmail

restrict_senders plugin, which caught another one).

At the time of the compromise, Hotmail blocked us (SMTP 5xx status) as 
the spam used a live.com sender address so they got backscatter as well 
as some direct spam. Perfectly understandable. I got a live.com
account to check https://postmaster.live.com/snds/ipStatus.aspx
and could see the stats. Now clear.

Since then, Hotmail seems to have been accepting mail from our server 
(2xx status) but then discarding it. After some experimentation with a 
test account, it seems that a reply to mail from a Hotmail customer
might 
get through, but not an "unsolicited" message. The mail seems to just 
disappear, not turn up in the junk folder.

I wondered if anyone else had had these issues. It seems almost 
irresponsible, just discarding legitimate email with no warning.

Microsoft support is asking us to sign up for all sorts of whitelist, 
SPF, sender ID programs plus their Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program, 
as if we were a commercial bulk mail provider, before wanting to look at

the problem.

Has anyone done any of this stuff ?

-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
Network Security Manager