Sending email to hotmail accounts

Question

I know there are lots of questions on here already about being able to send emails to hotmail. I have read through them all, as well as lots of online posts over the last few weeks and have still been unable to fix this issue.

The issue that I am having is that I am unable to send emails to customers who have a hotmail email address. I can send emails to yahoo fine, I can also send emails to gmail as well (although these seem to go to the junk folder), however when I sent emails to hotmail email addresses, they just seem to never arrive.

I am using swiftMailer in a PHP Symfony2 Application to send the emails. The server that my application sits on is a Linux CentOs box and I have open relay turned off

I have sent emails to '[email protected]' to check that SPF, DKIM and Sender-Id is setup correctly. Partial output of that report is below:

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Summary of Results

SPF check: pass

DomainKeys check: neutral

DKIM check: pass

Sender-ID check: pass

SpamAssassin check: ham

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The DomainKeys check is neutral, i'm not sure if that is required as as DKIM is an extension on the DomainKeys.

I have setup a v=spf1 record and a spf2.0/pra record in the DNS as TXT entries.

My help on this would be greatly appreciated. I think the issue may be to do with Sender-ID, but I dont know too much about this subject area.

Answer 1

Check your mail server logs. Are you seeing something like this for delivery to your Hotmail recipients:

550 SC-001 (COL004-MC4F43) Unfortunately, messages from xxx.xxx.xxx.xx weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.

If so, then it means that your mail server IP is on Microsoft's blacklist. You probably won't have much luck sending to users at live.com, outlook.com, or msn.com either. Fortunately, there is a solution. See the link below for a decent guide on how to resolve the problem: https://www.rackaid.com/blog/hotmail-blacklist-removal/.

The key is to submit a request to Microsoft to remove your IP address from their blacklist (at https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl3&ct=eformts&wa=wsignin1.0&scrx=1), but don't do that until you are sure that whatever caused you to become blacklisted has been resolved, as Microsoft doesn't like repeat offenders.