Tell HN: Microsoft classifies own emails as junk While going through my Outlook junk folder, I noticed that nearly all my Azure related mails are classified as such. These e-mails are all real and also sent by addresses like azure@email.microsoft.com with the source SMTP server being in a subdomain of PROD.OUTLOOK.COM. How comes that Microsoft would not just whitelist their own domains on their own e-mail service? |
Junk has a broad definition in outlook.com. It includes commercial emails too.
This is another reason why we use a third party filter and dial the MS one way down.
If they don't whitelist and the emails just land in spam without anyone taking notice, that reminds me more of the well-known slightly satirical image of Microsoft's org chart [1]
In other words: `*.notify.trafficmanager.net` is special-cased, and this has caused problems.
Does it really or does it just mean that nobody cared enough to do it for whatever reason?
I hope this refers to something behind the scenes that I as a Hotmail/Outlook user am unable to see. Because UI and product-wise, I don't see much evidence at all that someone of a good engineering culture cares about the experience I'm having with the product.
More like a team phoning it in.
My guess here is that some junk folder routing is on client side, or the user flagged junky email from the same infrastructure as junk. Or, O365 tweaked some settings to address the issues with spammers using Outlook infrastructure that bypasses spam controls.
They know these are legitimate emails though, so they should treat their presence in the spam folder as essentially a bug report.
Personally I'd say we have a limited bandwith to talk about prejudice in the public discourse. I'd rather we don't waste it away with useless remarks.
I can understand the difficulty in judging new domains, but having established, high value, high volume domains getting their email flagged as spam is ridiculous.
It could also be anti-competitive behaviour. They want the system to be a complex, opaque, black box because then it's more important for other providers to trust their IP ranges because they're a known-good participant. If you're a small sender that wants decent deliverability your options are Google, MS, etc..
"Your domain is about to expire, enter your Google username and password to renew it!"
If it was me, I'd pattern those emails to be exactly like the real ones. So then the real ones might get flagged by the spam filters too. You'd think they'd check who's sending them though (origin server)...
It's notorious that they have a hard time replicating products that competitors make look simple: look how the Steam store really works for for games, or how Dropbox works so much better than Onedrive.
A year or two ago, I did get Outlook to classify those emails as "Junk" automatically, by repeatedly reporting them - but then something changed, and after that they never were marked as "junk" again - no matter how often I do report them.
For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this.
Yep. There are situations where they'll simply ignore DMARC aligned messages if they don't like the content, filter them into (admin only) quarantine, and refuse to let you create rules for special cases so you receive important messages.
I know because I've had it happen.
Oh come on. Back when they first built Gmail, maybe sure.
But in the last 10 years or so? They’ve been totally ignoring the fact that they categorize their own non-marketing non-spammy emails, specifically requested on specific non-spammy topics by the user, generated by Google, and sent by Google, as spam. I don’t think they have worked harder than anybody on this. Snacked harder, maybe.
Most other companies seem interested in selling band-aids to repeated cuts than preventing the cuts in the first place.
We are seeing the initial skirmishes in a knock-down, drag-out war that users are going to lose.
In fact, the suggest that they should whitelist their own domains seems to be fairly monopolistic, something Microsoft has had to deal with in the past.
This seems appropriate and right, and not any indication of anything other than things work as they should.
Junk email classification seems to be hard for everyone. I've seen Apple and Google do similar things with their respective email clients and messages from their own companies.
At a previous job, we might have lost a significant contract if I hadn't been checking my Gmail junk folder. A former client was trying to contact me from a new company about potential work, and Gmail must have thought the start-up's domain was risky.
I attributed this to the sheer incompetence of the local admins. The same organization later switched to O365, and the problem remained unchanged.
It's an incredibly common problem. Super important email, like an outage is brewing, or they are EOL'ing something which is going to blow you up (like older TLS versions), and yeah, you got it, but you probably didn't read it.
I was losing a ton of important email because Microsoft would flag it as junk.
And even though I had complete admin rights over my tenant, I had no idea how to disable junk mail entirely.
(Also, fun fact, MS _still_ only gives you a 50GB mailbox! Google's at, like, a terabyte per user now...)
So for me they are spam and I will mark them as such. I'm on fastmail tho so not sure whether they get the feedback.
Maybe Microsoft has problems with people using Azure to send spam
The secret is that they aren't the same people.
Teams' bread and butter is being "good enough" for enterprise. And they're also locked into a lot of bad early decisions they made since they don't want to break compatibility for huge, paying customers of theirs. I feel like they have to be incredibly careful making changes to not step on toes in that regard, making development a slow-moving behemoth.
I just finished spending more hours than I want to count trying to clean my dad's PC of all licensing and account connections to his former employer's use of Office and OneDrive and onto his personal account and license. In hindsight I wish I had just nuked and paved it, or bought him an iPad with keyboard and mouse.
It's a fundamental problem of organizations operating across a wide variety of domains, because communication doesn't scale.
If you want your stock value to increase, profits has to too, so targeting the segment the most money is exchanged makes sense. But argh so boring.
https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&for...
It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons, but I think the state of email is such that simply reporting unwanted email as spam is a rational choice
This is likely true if the email is from a spammer.
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Happy to eat the downvotes here.
Beyond that, there’s still plenty of work to do but the surface area covered by wide spread DMARC adoption is huge.
The comment contained a grand total of three words. If someone has this initial reaction to those words in this context, perhaps they should consider their priors.
Yet, just remarking this is enough for insinuations like yours.
I work for a market research company. Most of our projects gain survey responses via market research panels - or panel marketplaces - so we don't need to email people to ask them to fill in surveys. But we do plenty of projects for clients who send us mailing lists of their customers, who we then contact to fill out surveys.
This is all fine and good but when you're contacting completely different lists of people all the time it's really easy to end up looking like a spammer (this is also why platforms like Sendgrid, and Mailchimp - although great in many ways - aren't a good fit for a market research use case: you're not just contacting the same list, or subsets of that list, over and over; mostly you're contacting different lists for each project, unless you're following up for a single client).
We've had to build our own mailing platform to do this successfully, so that our email is actually delivered into peoples' inboxes, rather than going to their spam folders.
And it's not just the content of the email that matters: it's how you send it, making sure you have DKIM and whathaveyou configured correctly, whether the HTML is valid, etc. Our system automatically checks every aspect of an email before anyone is allowed to hit send (and each send has to be reviewed by one of a list of approved individuals). It also checks the mailing list and cleans out any addresses that are likely to be bad, or who have unsubscribed. Again, if you're not careful about who you send email to, you'll look like a spammer.
A big chunk of our business depends on our ability to get emails into inboxes, so we take great care to make sure that happens. Reputation is everything when it comes to bulk emailing in market research. Because humans under pressure to deliver sometimes cut corners we've baked that great care right into our systems. They're not foolproof, but it's now really quite hard, and would require concerted and deliverate effort, for anyone on our team to send an email without the vast majority of intended recipients receiving it.
This whole thing is a kind of nightmarish arms race but I've been doing this for long enough that I'd put money on it not being Microsoft's spam classification doing it wrong here.
- Receive new e-mail from MS user at IP X
- Send reply to the same user from IP X
- notice IP is blacklisted, so the email doesn't even end in spam
Great engineering. Users must be excited MS allows them to send e-mail to servers they know are blacklisted, so will not be able to receive the reply from.
Great [honest] engineering would be to just refuse to send the e-mail and tell the user that they are not allowed (by MS) to communicate with this recipient.
Frankly, the vast bulk of the email in my Spam folder isn't egregious fake medicine and the like. It's mostly low quality mailing lists, much of which isn't much different from what ends up in my inbox.
Today, Outlook.com and Hotmail.com combined still have a pretty strong market share.
I use Windows 11 Enterprise and I've never seen ads in the start menu, because corporate customers wouldn't put up with that.
Same here, just because you work in a different team doesn't mean people won't associate you with the rest of the crap the very same company puts out.
Ads in the Start Menu might not make a lot of money but investors might be impressed that Microsoft is at least trying to make a few more cents here and there.
I wonder if Amazon treats employees so poorly not because this is good for business but because it helps Wall Street accept Amazon's loss-making habits (at least they aren't being generous with the help) and maybe convinces a few customers that Amazon is trying really hard to serve them well.
I would totally consider emails I received because of either of those things as spam. If I get an unsolicited email, it gets reported as spam regardless of the presence of an opt-out link. I wouldn't click any link in an email that came from someone I didn't opt into getting email from.
point is that while it's disappointing for the west to lack a clear moral sensibility, the linguistics are perfectly coherent
So, even a "virtuous woman" possesses "manly" good qualities. Repugnant, isn't it?
3000 years from now conservatives will be reading from their "Old Testament" about the evils of political correctness even if they are hazy about the details as if Stanford was on the East Coast or the West Coast.
There was a blog post that got flagged this morning where somebody was complaining about those "In those house we believe signs..." which I haven't seen around for a year or so.
