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Today a client who uses 1and1 hosting called in complaining that they could not send any email to a Hotmail account and wanted to know why. I confirmed there outgoing mail server with them, had them send me test messages to other accounts, (not MSN or Hotmail) and there mail was delivered fine. So I had them forward over the returned mail and it said the following:

SMTP error from remote server after MAIL command:
host mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.245.72]:
550 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. We recommend enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail lists. For enrollment instructions, please refer to:
http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx#JMRPP. For additional information about Microsoft’s technical guidelines, please refer to:
http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx

At first I thought well there IP address on there network is being blocked by hotmai, for security reasons I will not list that information here. I went to spamhaus and did not see there network IP on the list, then I remember though that MSN/Hotmail does not use spamhaus to block out IP addresses. They have there own “in house” spam filter system that they use. So my next thing was to check and see what other websites are on the same IP as my clients, a simple check at MyIPneighbors.com will do just fine. There were only two other websites that is on the same shared IP, so I was now going to call 1and1 and see about moving my clients website to another shared server so they would receive a different IP address. I figured moving it to a different server and changing the IP of the domain name would do the trick, boy was I wrong.

1and1 makes you use there mail servers to send and receive your email, so by default you have to use smtp.1and1.com as your outgoing mail server. Most of the time hosting companies allow you to use mail.yourdomain.com or smtp.yourdomain.com as the mail server. This was not the case, so moving the domain to another server/IP would not solve the problem. After speaking with a manger there, I was told that mail server is blocked completely by MSN/Hotmail and at this time the only way to send mail to those people was to use the mail server of your ISP. I was speechless for a moment, this big of a hosting company has there entire network blocked by MSN…WOW! They have known about this issue for several weeks and I was told they are working with MSN to get this problem resolved. There was no time frame giving for when the problem might be resolved, I just hope soon.

So how would this effect any marketing you are doing with a website. Well for starters if you use 1and1 hosting for any of your websites, you will not be able to email to MSN/Hotmail. There could be other domains, but currently I am still trying to figure out who else is blocked. If you run an auto responder, using 1and1 could put a dent in your marketing efforts due to the fact your auto response will not get delivered. If you run a forum, any passwords, confirmation letters, etc. will not be delivered to a MSN/Hotmail account. Who will stay at the forum if they cannot receive any emails from you in regards to changing there password or even worse when they sign up they never hear back from you. I am in no way saying not to use them as your hosting company, I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention that they are currently experiencing problems getting mail delivered to MSN/Hotmail. If you know of other web hosting companies that have a similar problem please post them here so all are aware of it.