No worries. If you migrate your email server to Azure(TM) the delivery is guaranteed.

Keep a few throwaway Hotmail/Outlook addresses in your password manager, in case you need to use a Windows PC that demands a Microslop account. That's about the end of their usefulness.

Just like Internet Explorer used to be the program you used once -- and only once -- to download a proper browser.

I wonder how many accounts on other services were then hijacked using "forgot my password" attacks.

UPDATE: After a bit of digging it looks like they started the username recycling policy in 2013, may have quietly stopped doing that in 2018 but formalized no longer doing that in 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20230627104616/https://www.micro...

"Summary of changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement – June 15, 2021 [...] In the Outlook and Office Services sections, we’ve removed the Outlook.com section to clarify that an email address or username is not recycled into our system or assigned to another user."

It's certainly not free to run and maybe it doesn't really make sense for Microsoft to run Outlook.com anymore, except that it's an easy way to motivate people to having a Microsoft account.

Outlook.com certainly has to show up as an expense, one that Microsoft would like to reduce. When you look at what other providers charge for a single email account, it's hard to see Microsoft making money of Outlook.com. There's obviously something to be said for scale, but still, it must cost them something.

They wiped all the emails from my 25 year old Hotmail account. Pretty weak. I refuse to use Microsoft products except if forced, and do my best to evangelize this position.

Often these "spam" reports by end users are just accidental clicks as well. Many of the abuse reports we get are like an email from someone's Mum and visibly legitimate. At other times there are users who use the Report Spam function as a kind of inbox management tool - a way of moving mail away so they don't have to see it because Trash or Delete or whatever is just further away from their pointer.

My org (USA) was affected. I wasn't the primary person dealing with it, but from what I gather one user marked one of our emails as junk, and then suddenly all of our emails to Outlook users started getting blocked.

> There's no hint as to how many users were actually affected.

How many users would you see as the threshold then?

Since you stated that there is a spin to this, how many users would go over your defined threshold level?

Someone recently leveraged some kind of automated spam attack against my domain using Zendesk's email servers. For some reason, Zendesk doesn't enforce SPF and DKIM checks when opening new tickets, so I got flooded with "your new account has been registered" and "thank you for filing a ticket" emails.

I blocked off Zendesk entirely because they didn't fix their shitty email system. The other newsletter mail services (mailgun/sendgrid/etc.) are just as bad for this.

There are plenty of reasons why large email senders could (and should) be on reputation blacklists. None of these email delivery companies seem to care very much about the spam they send until shit hits the fan, and now that it did it seems everyone blames the people maintaining the blacklists.

The article has hyperlinks in it, e.g. to this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5786144/...

which comes from an ESP serving millions of users.

To be fair, Outlook.com has always been a bit shitty, if you're trying to deliver email to them. Last time it was reasonably good the service was still called Hotmail.

The problem is that we've allowed email to be centralized around a few massive providers, who do not care about customer service. If you're large enough, you probably have a contact at Microsoft for Outlook. Everyone else has to yell into the void and sometimes that works.

Why do you feel the need to pollute HN with terrible slashdot jokes?

I would start migrating to an email domain that you control. It will come useful at one point or another.

I learned this lesson the hard way with OneDrive.

Now I only use Windows for legacy software that my customers force on me.

Fedora has not just been liberating, but jaw dropping. I actually felt offended that I had wasted so much time on debian-family/ubuntu/mint and windows.

You could start the process now, before the ruin?