Important Information for HotMail Users

- Bennett Haselton, 1/30/2001

This is not a hoax.
You can email enforce_policy@hotmail.com for confirmation that this happened.

If you tried to send email to Peacefire.org from a HotMail account between August 2000 and January 2001, HotMail may have blocked your email from reaching us. The "Returned Mail" message would have looked like this, saying that our server could not be contacted. HotMail has confirmed that they were actually blocking it on their end. You can now re-send your message to bennett@peacefire.org if you think it may have been blocked.

HotMail subscribes to a "boycott list" of sites called the "Realtime Blackhole List" (RBL), maintained by a group called "MAPS"; the list includes some spammers, but some ISP's are targeted for boycotting even if they don't allow spam, if MAPS believes they are "contributing to the spam problem". Our hosting company, Media3, prohibits hosted sites from spamming, but has no restrictions on the legal content of sites that are hosted, so a group of Media3's IP addresses are on the boycott list for selling bulk email software or consulting services to spammers. (We asked MAPS to remove our address from the list since we didn't have any involvement with those sites, but they declined, suggesting that we move to another ISP.)

We don't know if HotMail was participating in the boycott voluntarily, or if MAPS had led them to believe the boycott list was actually a "list of known spammers" (in which case HotMail could have been using the RBL thinking that it was intended to be an accurate spam filter). This is apparently a widespread misconception about the RBL (the MAPS RBL Web page strongly implies this, with statements like, "We are a method to identify likely spam origin").

Media3 did complain to HotMail, and HotMail agreed to stop blocking their users from emailing Media3-hosted sites. However, for a brief period, HotMail continued to block mail from being sent to other sites on the boycott list. Recently we tried sending mail to some other blacklisted sites from HotMail, and the emails did not generate "Returned Mail" error messages, so we don't know if HotMail is still blocking outgoing mail or not.

- Bennett Haselton