ADM: Issues with Hotmail - Weather Report

[Guest guest]

From the official groups Team blog

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Issues with Hotmail (current forecast: cloudy with clearer skies on the

horizon)

Hotmail, as many of you are aware, bounces significant percentages of email

from . is delivering the messages to Hotmail; but

instead of delivering these messages to their users, Hotmail is rejecting

them. Fortunately, there is some good news on the horizon.

One reason Hotmail bounces messages is a problem best described as “too many

hops”. Because of the size of (we send more mail than anyone

else in the world) and the way our backend systems are designed to handle

this scale, messages are frequently passed through many different servers,

with each of these servers representing “a hop”. Unfortunately, Hotmail

rejects mail that exceeds a certain number of hops. This is a reasonable

step to take (as a way to protect against infinite loops), except that

Hotmail (and Exchange Server by default), has set their limit so low (at 15

hops) that many messages, particularly those posted to

moderated groups, exceed the limit and are bounced. Hotmail has been

unwilling or unable to raise this limit, either for all email regardless of

the source or for mail in particular.

To address this problem, we are reconfiguring our systems to reduce the

number of visible hops and expect this “too many hops” problem to be

resolved by our next release.

However, this change will likely not eliminate all problems with deliveries

to Hotmail (though it should significantly reduce the number).

Unfortunately, it is all we can do on our end. As with all situations where

email messages are bouncing, we are delivering the mail, but it is being

rejected by the ISP or web mail provider. Which means it is ultimately up to

them to correct the situation by providing their users with all the messages

they are supposed to receive. So if you are a Hotmail user who has not been

getting all of their Groups email, please complain to Hotmail and ask them

to stop blocking messages from .

If you are experiencing an issue not listed in this weather report, we may

be aware of it but not reporting it based on the number of users affected.

If you’d like to report an issue to us please do so via the Customer Care

Help Form.

http://help./l/us//groups/original/forms_index.html Otherwise,

feel free to post your questions or comments below. (see link at bottom of

message)

Thank you,

Jami Heldt

Groups Community Manager

Wednesday September 19, 2007 - 02:54pm (PDT)

http://blog.360./blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=6906