Hotmail and it’s SPAM rating

Unfortunately, this is a common issue with Office 365 / Hotmail / Outlook. You are in good company in their spam folder. Often Outlook even stores its own messages into the spam folder!

How can we expect messages to arrive consistently in the inbox when the people who created the inbox can’t even get their own emails there? However, there are things you can do to improve your chances.

Do your best

You do your best by making sure you get the highest possible score out of 10 from mail-tester.com. It’s simple: go to mail-tester.com, copy the email address you received, send the email to them, wait a few seconds and then click the button to check your score. After that, do what you can to improve your score.

Report false positives

Microsoft has published an article about reporting false positive SPAM scores:
Report false positives and false negatives in Outlook (Microsoft)

“It’s your corrupted IP reputation!”

We get this a lot, so we might as well address it publicly. We have no evidence that our IP reputation increases the likelihood of delivery to Hotmail’s spam folder, only hearsay and theoretical interpetations. Here are the reasons why we reject this explanation:

1. Microsoft SNDS and its employees repeatedly confirm that our IP reputation is flawless on their systems. We do not receive any complaints through their SNDS program.

2. There are not many email providers that take IP reputation as seriously as we do. Our monitoring, alerting, and human attention across all of our systems are far superior to the industry gold standard, which typically states that all you have to do is file a complaint and they will take care of it within the next 30 days.

3. We are able to deliver email through our IPs to the inboxes of the services hosted by Microsoft.

From our point of view, all evidence points to the contrary, namely that our IP reputation has no influence on the delivery of messages in Microsoft’s SPAM folder. If you have factual information beyond the scope of “I sent from somewhere else, inbox. I sent from you, spam folder” (correlation does not imply causality), then please let us know and start a support ticket.