microsoft olc
Bounce message. SMTP rejection. Deferral message. Non-delivery report (NDR). 5xx error. 4xx error. No matter what you call them, there are a zillion different kinds of them out there. Heck, Microsoft’s got at least four different ways to tell you “user unknown.” Memorizing all of these is hard. Probably impossible. So, if you’re looking for a big ole’ list of all (or at least most) of the different rejections or deferrals you can run into when sending emails to Microsoft, let’s be grateful that they’ve got a very handy chart that breaks down just about all of the different types of 4xx and 5xx responses you can receive when trying to send to Exchange Online / Office 365. There are close to 70 different types of NDRs listed; and it’s a good and handy resource that you should bookmark, though I admit that I don’t know if it covers absolutely
It’s time for another entry in the DELIVTERMS dictionary! Today, let’s define JMRP. JMRP is the “Junk Mail Reporting Program,” the mechanism by which email sending platforms and internet service providers can receive complaints back whenever an Outlook.com (Microsoft OLC) user clicks the “report spam” button to tell Microsoft that they think a particular email message is spam. You might find some older documentation that refers to this as the “Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program” (JMRPP) – that’s an older name for the same thing. Overall, mailbox providers and internet service providers call these types of mechanisms “Feedback Loops.” Thus, the JMRP is the Microsoft Outlook.com ISP feedback loop. A sender must utilize a dedicated sending IP address to sign up for JMRP; the intent is for the owner of an IP address to get complaints back about mail sent from their own IP address. (Platform owners, whether or not
Microsoft’s SNDS (Smart Network Data Services), the reputation portal that provides deliverability feedback for folks sending to Microsoft Outlook.com/Hotmail, appears to be down at the moment. Microsoft has set an “under maintenance” static page in its place, as of my last check at 9:15 am US central time on Wednesday, October 18th.I’ll update this page as I get more information.What is SNDS? Click here to learn more.
When sending to Microsoft OLC (Outlook Consumer – i.e. hotmail.com, outlook.com, msn.com, live.com, etc.) domains, are you seeing this bounce message?Microsoft: 5.4.4 (unable to route: no mail hosts for domain)If you’re seeing that error message, or something similar, here’s what’s happening, I think, based on what some smart folks have shared with me.All of those domains have an MX record that points to outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com. And when you look up the IP addresses for that server mentioned in the MX record, what do you get? Well, when I do it from here, I get just two IPs: 104.47.58.33 and 104.47.55.33.But other folks showed me examples where they were receiving 25+ IP addresses in response. I can’t reproduce it, so I don’t know if it’s geo-specific, intermittent, or if overall, the whole thing has been addressed. I suspect some combination of all of that. But anyway, I’m told that when the results
Looks like Microsoft has run into email authentication issues today. Specifically, the domain hotmail.com appears to have a broken SPF record wherein messages sent by Hotmail/Outlook.com/Microsoft OLC using a hotmail.com from address aren’t passing SPF authentication. Here’s a link to a KBXSCORE report I’ve run, showing the failure.While hotmail.com is affected, the outlook.com domain doesn’t appear troubled — my test sends from an outlook.com from address seem to pass SPF. (Microsoft has many other domains; I’ve only checked these two.)Looking at the SPF records for hotmail.com, here’s what I see:hotmail.com descriptive text “v=spf1 include:spf-a.outlook.com include:spf-b.outlook.com ip4:157.55.9.128/25 include:spf-a.hotmail.com include:_spf-ssg-b.microsoft.com include:_spf-ssg-c.microsoft.com -all”outlook.com descriptive text “v=spf1 include:spf-a.outlook.com include:spf-b.outlook.com ip4:157.55.9.128/25 include:spf-a.hotmail.com include:_spf-ssg-b.microsoft.com include:_spf-ssg-c.microsoft.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all”The hotmail.com SPF record is missing “include:spf.protection.outlook.com” — which is present in the outlook.com SPF record. And I see it present in a cached copy of Hotmail’s SPF record that I collected last month. So, I suspect that to be
Starting on August 16th, Microsoft seems to have stopped sending feedback loop reports. Microsoft’s FBL is called the “JMRP” (Junk Mail Reporting Program) and multiple folks are indicating that the email feed of complaint reports that this entails seems to have dried up. Microsoft has been notified but I’ve not heard of any ETA for a fix at this time. I’ll be sure to update this post if/when I receive more information.[ H/T: LB Blair and others ]
Microsoft OLC, aka “Microsoft Outlook Consumer,” aka what used to be called Hotmail, now called Outlook.com (which includes the domains hotmail.com, outlook.com, live.com, msn.com, and all the other Microsoft domains I’ve listed here), will soon respect DMARC policy on inbound mail, declining to accept unauthenticated mail from domains with a DMARC policy of “reject.” Yahoo and Gmail already reject this type of failed mail today.Current state: If an email message sent to Microsoft OLC domains failed DMARC and the DMARC domain had a policy of “reject,” Microsoft would not actually reject that email message. It would end up in the junk mail folder instead. (Even though the specification strongly suggests that this mail should be rejected.)Why this is sub-optimal: It overrode a domain owner’s publicly stated desire (via that DMARC record in DNS) to reject mail that failed DMARC checks. This meant that more bad mail was likely to get into
Mashable’s Tim Marcin and others are reporting that a failure in Microsoft’s spam filtering has resulted in Outlook.com (Hotmail) users receiving a bunch of spam in their inbox unexpectedly. Meaning, something broke — a something that would have previously either blocked those messages or relegated them to the Junk Folder.I wasn’t able to confirm this myself; my personal and test Outlook.com addresses are too well protected from public view; meaning they’re not on any common spam lists. I’ve updated my website contact info to use an outlook.com account, so I’m sure I’ll start getting spam there soon. Maybe I’ll be able to observe this for myself. (Hey, that’s aliversonchicago@outlook.com, for all the spambots out there.)This could be causing a unique scenario or two. Not only are bad guys perhaps scrambling to send as much garbage as they can before the spam filter loophole is corrected, but for email sending platforms
Check it out! It looks like Microsoft has updated SNDS to provide a bit more info than they provided previously. In the “Comments” column, they’re now including snapshot counts of spam complaints received for that IP address at various points throughout the day.Where it says 10 complaints at 4:30 pm and 18 complaints at 4:37 pm, I think that means that eight complaints came in between 4:30 and 4:37. Might that be useful for folks looking to better identify which sends at which time are generating the most complaints?Note: It appears that the date/time in that comments field is when the complaint occurred, not when the campaign was sent. I’ve seen at least one example where that complaint date in the comments is a few days after the campaign send date. I suspect that could cause a bit of confusion.[ H/T: Mawutor Amesawu and Jennifer Nespola Lantz ]