Junk mail trader trying to sell a sucker a style.

October 2, 2007 8:00 PM

Every time I send an email from my cox.net account to my mom's MSN mail account, I get an autoreply from MSN saying there are complaints about my IP address sending junk mail. Huh?

Here is what I get:

Please reply to [e-mail]
if you feel this message to be in error.
Reporting-MTA: dns; fed1rmmtao102.cox.net
Arrival-Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 22:07:09 -0400
Received-From-MTA: dns; fed1rmimpo02.cox.net (70.169.32.72)

Final-Recipient: RFC822; [e-mail]
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mx1.hotmail.com (65.54.245.8)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. We recommend enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail lists. For enrollment instructions, please refer to: http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx#JMRPP. For additional information about Microsoft's technical guidelines, please refer to: http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx



Can someone explain what this all means and how I can convince Microsoft I just want to send my mom some pictures of her two year old grandson - unless its him spamming...

For what its worth, I have a MacBook Pro and a Airport Extreme network with WAP security. And of course, the humor of getting this message when I myself receive about 10 junk emails a day from Hotmail addresses is not lost on me.

posted by uaudio to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Some Cox customer has probably spammed a Hotmail address in the recent past. Cox has a lot of customers, so it's certainly not impossible that one of them sent some spam. Send the message through another mail account, like Gmail (or Hotmail, for that matter).

According to this page, the mail server you're using isn't on any of the major blacklists, so it's definitely a blacklist internal to Hotmali.
posted by kindall at 8:11 PM on October 2, 2007

It sounds like the SMTP server that you use to send emails with has been blacklisted by Microsoft. This is probably something you should take up with your ISP, since they own the server, and they should deal on your behalf with Microsoft to get the issue resolved. There is probably nothing you can do except alert both msn and your ISP.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 8:15 PM on October 2, 2007

Spam filtering has gotten so aggressive these days that we're all surfing the border between filtering out the junk and actually losing some real mail. Most filtering systems allow you to be added to some kind of safe list, though.

Since you probably don't want to ask your mom to figure out how to do that, ask her for her MSN mail account password, then log into her account over the web yourself and look around to see if you can add yourself to some kind of approved sender's list.

Sometimes just being in the other person's address book can mark you as approved. If you don't find anything in the settings, add yourself to her address book.
posted by scarabic at 8:58 PM on October 2, 2007

...although it's true that any IP-level filtering is probably not managed out of your Mom's account prefs but on some higher level by MSN network admins. Really, you probably need to contact them. I'd complain to your ISP first, though. They've probably already heard this from other customers and might even be working on it now.
posted by scarabic at 9:00 PM on October 2, 2007

This is becoming a common problem for a lot of users. I always suggest to move away from ISP provided email and get a free account from Google, Microsoft, or Hotmail. It's a lifetime account and these email providers rarely get blocked. I know it doesn't solve your current problem, but if you switch now, you won't run into it down the road.
posted by seniorzo at 11:29 PM on October 2, 2007

I had a similar problem last week trying to email Yahoo users, and got a 'message delayed' response from Yahoo. My ISP tech support told me this:

This 'bounce back' behaviour from Yahoo is something that they do deliberately to reduce the amount of spam (commonly known as graylisting). In effect, Yahoo are choosing to generate additional email traffic and slow down the mail delivery process.

Unfortunately, I have discussed this with our systems administrators and there is nothing we can do to resolve this issue. We have already been in contact with Yahoo and they don't do whitelisting because that would open up holes from which spammers could attack their systems.

So I'm sending to Yahoo users via Gmail through their SMTP servers instead.

And yes, one of the reasons I stay with a small ISP is because I can email tech support and get a reply within hours. A reply that actually addresses the query, from a real, live person.
posted by essexjan at 1:33 AM on October 3, 2007

Ditto scarabic. I've had this problem with my address hosted at Dreamhost, sending to Comcast a few times. Every time it's happened I've alerted Dreamhost support, and they contacted Comcast and got themselves unblocked.

still irritating as hell...
posted by cabingirl at 5:01 AM on October 3, 2007