leyton.org

Puzzling. Crap even. Hotmail that is. It treats any mail from gmail.com as spam by default, resulting in lost e-mail and frustration all around.

The story is as follows: A friend is currently travelling and working in Germany. Said chap has a gmail account, and has used it to stay in touch with family and friends easily. A friend of his (new to e-mail) has recently setup a hotmail account to stay in touch. But no e-mails are coming through at all from our travelling friend.

The reason? Well, having tried to help out and setup a test Hotmail account to prove the theory: hotmail seems to mark any e-mail originating from the gmail.com domain as spam, and drops it into the “Junk” folder. For a new-comer to the world of e-mail, “Junk” is a folder they’ll not visit by default, and they’ll not necessarily understand why it would have been classified as that, much less to then mark the e-mailer as trusted so it doesn’t get classified as junk in future. The result is a lot of mail is going amiss, and frustration is felt all around.

It seems to me that Microsoft have taken a catastrophically wrong approach, or at least have some very very bad spam filteration rules such that they’ll classify an entire domain - a big one at that - as Junk. My e-mail from leyton.org goes through just fine after all, and I’d have thought if you’re not going to trust gmail.com, you’re as well not to trust anybody first time around (much less an arbitrary small personal domain)

And don’t get me started on the hotmail sign up process. Oh look, you just did. Talk about convoluted and incredibly awful. The Captcha is almost indecipherable (and I’ve seen a few in my time), the force-feeding of “newsletters” (hah! Spam? What spam?) down my throat, and as for the flashing adverts for credit cards I don’t want, well, I’ll just stick to the altogether sane and minimalist google text ads thanks.