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Hotmail Blocks Gmail Emails (and Invites)
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jun 21, 2004 08:19 AM
from the intereting-tests dept.
from the intereting-tests dept.
bonhomme_de_neige writes "Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce, but nor do they arrive in the recipient's Inbox - they vanish mysteriously into the aether. Joel Johnson writes in his Gizmodo weblog that invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced (this even received coverage from ZDNet). Search Engine Roundtable writes that several ISPs are blocking Gmail. It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking." Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another.
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Stunning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stunning (Score:4, Interesting)
An email service blocking emails from a competing email service is surprising. Has this ever happened before? Is this even legal?
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
Methinks ISPs are using "Privacy Concerns" as a way of keeping customers from leaving their quickly aging service. "Hey look, bearded technology pundits with nothing better to do are upset about ads in a radical new free email service. They're waving the privacy flag. We can wave the same flag and lock people in to viewing our contextually inaccurate ads a little bit longer!"
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
What amuses me about all of this is that ISPs and stupid technology writers keep waving that flag, but it's not like Google is trying to be underhanded about how the service works. They seem to make it pretty clear what's going to happen when you sign up.
Essentially, anyone who blocks Gmail invites would be saying "well, I understand that you agreed to what Google offered, but I feel as though I have more say in your decisions, so I'm rescinding your approval and issuing a denial on your behalf". How is THAT not an abuse of privacy? If they really felt that their customers' privacy was at risk, why wouldn't they just offer a warning? Blocking the e-mails is essentially saying that you have more say in your customer's decisions than they do online, PLUS it indicates that you were watching their mail in the first place!
Do you I smell a pile of boving excrement wafting on the breeze from the direction of a few dirty ISPs and freemail providers?
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
Real ISPs come and go, you are not in college forever, and you dont keep the same job forever. However, you CAN keep one of these "second-rate" email addresses indefinitely. I have had my yahoo account for years, while friends and colleagues change their "real" email accounts year after year, mine has always been the same. I have lost touch with many people because they changed email addresses and never told anyone.
Thanks for the short-sighted answer.
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
I started my hosting company as a cooperative just so I could get rid of my favorite email "alias," dasmegabyte@mindless.com, which the company providing the alias had sold to spammers when I told them no, I won't give you $10 a month to forward my fucking email with ads at the bottom. Incidentally, I lost a job in 2001 because the hiring staff sent an email to dasmegabyte@mindless.com and I had already dropped that account -- there was too much spam to sort through.
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Funny)
mgrassi99@yahoo.com
mikegrassi@hotmail.com
-M
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Interesting)
But paid-for doesn't always mean better. I'm on NTL, and in the last year the email service has become unuseable (emails sometimes take months to arrive, or sometimes disappear altogether; sometimes connecting to POP or SMTP is very difficult). Paid-for doesn't mean you have more of a position to complain, when your complaints are completely ignored. Whilst gmail blocking seems to be restricted to free email accounts, it is not inconceivable that paid for ISPs may try dirty tactics.
Switching to a free email account (that I still use a "real email client" for) took five minutes, but switching entirely to a new cable ISP would take far longer.
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but your city council does not put the "No Solicitors" sign on your door for you, and give you no option to remove it if you happen to enjoy solicitors.
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Informative)
Actually - it happened in this order. Test email sent to Hotmail, did not arrive. Story submitted to Slashdot. Email arrived in Hotmail account several hours later (after other emails I sent from my other accounts _after_ the one from gmail - which arrived almost instantly). I've read several reports of Hotmail both bouncing and vanishing Gmail email - I'm sure if you hunt around you can find even more. It may be that they are changing their behaviour as they realise it'd going to do them more harm then good.
As for the Yahoo one, that is definitely true.
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Re:Stunning (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unable to verify... (Score:5, Funny)
But I won't let that stop me from posting it!
Re:Unable to verify... (Score:5, Interesting)
Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce...invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced
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Re:Unable to verify... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Unable to verify... (Score:5, Informative)
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Mountains (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mountains (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Mountains (Score:5, Insightful)
it may not be that 'it's gmail invite' but that it's 'identicle to other mail'
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I don't want to be nasty, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
Dunno about you lot but... (Score:4, Informative)
Really? (Score:4, Informative)
A New Era? (Score:4, Funny)
Are the editors finally trying to verify things around here?
If that's the case, I commend them.
I did receive one (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunate legal names (Score:4, Funny)
Is this something new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blog crap (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the blog article the writer blows all credibility when he reveals that someone just told him about the "Sent Folder":
Update: Thanks to everyone telling me to check the Sent folder. I can at least retrieve the invites now.
When are people going to realize that blogs are the equivalent of public urination on the web. People post stream of consciousness bullshit dressed up as "information" or even "facts" and because it's on a blog, well then, it must be true.
John.
Re:Blog crap (Score:5, Funny)
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Making a big deal out of nothing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson is simple: Hotmail's spam filter sucks. Legitimate mail gets tagged as spam all the time, and real spam gets through to the inbox even more often.
It's not some great anti-gmail conspiracy, just another sensationalist Slashdot story.
Re:Making a big deal out of nothing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The invite was certainly bulk. It arrived as a part of a large number of substantively identical email messages. Like with posts to properly run mailing lists and other legitimate bulk email, your invite was solicited, so your copy wasn't spam.
Note that bulkiness is measurable. Simply count messages that match fuzzy checksums.
Spamminess, on the other hand, is far harder to measure, as it depends on the users' sometimes erroneous recollections of whether they solicited the bulk messages.
But Hotmail didn't call it spam. They called it bulk. That sounds quite proper and accurate to me.
Parent
Take off your tinfoil hats (Score:5, Informative)
Much as I enjoy wearing my tinfoil hat, I think it can be dispensed with here.
Both Hotmail and Yahoo mail have been plagued with spam, and with users demanding they do something about that spam. Indeed, that's one reason people are interested in GMail.
Since almost all spam -- anything we think of spam, anyway -- arrives in mass quantities, and a logical way to reduce spam is simply to look for many addresses receiving the same email.
So a decent first cut at filtering bulk spam (and recall that both Yahoo and Hotmail use "bulk mail" folders) would be to take an MD5 sum of each email (not including the "To" address header lines, of course), stick the sum in hash table or other database, and increment a counter for each email with that MD5 sum. Once the counter reached some arbitrary large-ish number, you'd mark all copies of that emails spam.
Since the GMial invite varies slightly, it's clear that something fuzzier than an MD5 sum is being used, but the principle remains the same.
The first N GMail invites weren't marked as "bulk email"; after the counter threshold was reached, all the rest have been.
So all we've learned from this is that, even during this invite-only beta test, GMail must be sending out a hell of a lot of invites, and that, yes indeed, Hotmail and Yahoo customers demanded and got "bulk email" filtering.
So take off the tinfoil hats -- you'll have a real reason to wear them soon enough [usdoj.gov].
Re:Take off your tinfoil hats (Score:5, Interesting)
This is true. But, what probably triggered it was this: A few users received Gmail invites and either didn't know what it was, or didn't recognize the person they received it from, saw it was offering another email service, then clicked the button that says "This is Spam". When Hotmail gets a few reports like that the message text gets added to their filters and everyone else's invites start going to the Spam folder.
That's just standard operating procedure. If they didn't have that procedure in place we'd receive 50-100 spams a day in our Hotmail box.
Of course, none of this would have been a problem if Hotmail hadn't sold all of their account lists to bulk emailers years ago. Hotmail is the only service that when I first created an account, instantly started sending me spam before I had even given my address out to anyone. The only way they could have gotten my address is if Hotmail sold it to bulk senders.
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Gmail invite (Score:5, Informative)
Just so y'all know: I used http://www.gmailswap.com to get the invite. Thanks guys!
~D
Email wars, probably predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember at the dawn of the electrical age there were competing companies with many different voltages, made for exciting interoperability issues. Goverment regulation could be a blessing.
Clever ... (Score:5, Funny)
Suddenly... (Score:5, Funny)
Confirmed: False. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, yeah. I'm afraid this is... not true. At least as far as hotmail is concerned.
Well gee, it works fine for me.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Well gee, it works fine for me.... (Score:5, Informative)
Same here. A gmail invite sent to google arrived quite happily in my inbox, and I have hotmail's spam filter set to high. Test emails sent from my gmail account to hotmail did arrive.
But hey, lets not let the facts get in way of a knee jerk reaction <g>
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Re:MS & Google (Score:5, Funny)
LIMITED TIME OFFER!
NATURAL ENHANCEMENT!
ABOUT YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT
FREE FREE FREE FREE
SIGN UP NOW!
http://gmail.com
For more info, I send you this file in order to have your advice.
Parent
Re:MS & Google (Score:4, Interesting)
If it "just has to get there", you wouldn't be using email in the first place. But even if you are using email, why on earth would you be using Hotmail? If it's that important, you should be using your own SMTP server over which you have control. Instead, you're relying on a third party, that you're not paying, and with whom you have no service level agreement. Not a smart move for data you care about...
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your own SMTP server? ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:MS & Google (Score:4, Informative)
Do tell, what law are they breaking? I must have missed the one which says that ISP's and other electronic mail carriers must deliver all e-mails passing through their systems.
Hotmail, like Gmail are run on private networks and anyone using said networks are bound by the whims of their owners and operators.
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Re:MS & Google (Score:5, Informative)
Do tell, what law are they breaking? I must have missed the one which says that ISP's and other electronic mail carriers must deliver all e-mails passing through their systems.
I think that you're right, but I think that the confusion exists because of existing laws concerning common carriers [atis.org].
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Re:MS & Google (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:MS & Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I really wish they could do it, I'm in the military and am looking at one of those long stints away from loved ones soon... but the fact of the matter is, if it's not for official military use, it won't get funding. That and rolling cable in the desert just makes one more security issue to deal with which requires manpower we can't spare right now.
Yeah yeah, but WIRELESS!.... is a security nightmare right now and lets face it, no matter how many times COMSEC and COMPUSEC are briefed there is always some nimrod on the network violating the security measures.
War isn't about being comfortable, the military's primary concern is that we stay alive, not that we have email. They've actually gone to great lengths to set up call centers and email access as it is, but you could easily wait in line for 2 hours for your turn. But trust me when I tell you that those connections that are allowed are closely monitored (fewer connections mean fewer resources required to monitor them).
Warfare is as much about information control as manpower these days.
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My Gmail invite got put into my spam folder... (Score:5, Interesting)
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