Hotmail Bouncing too many emails!

[skuba]

Something is going one! I will explain first. Many of you will answer that I am blacklisted or that my email copy looks too spammy. But I don't think that's the case.

We usually get 2k bounced email out of the 100k we send. This time we got 16k, 12k of them being hotmail emails.
We have a total of 16k hotmail emails in our database, and 12k bounced, this is 75%.

We also got 2k bounced from MSN.com, which is the same thing. 2k out of 3k MSN users we have.

My thoughts:
- Are we blacklisted? I don't think so, cause not ALL emails got bounced.

- Was the copy too spam looking like? Yes, it was, althought it wasn't spam, we had words like Save, Click here, Order now, etc...
BUT BUT BUT
I took a sample of hotmail and msn users and sent them a NON-SPAM looking like email. No words like Save, Click here, Order, etc... It was a clean email, except for HTML in it.

90% of the emails on that sample also bounced back!

So, I am getting kind of crazy here. WHat are your thoughts?

Did you notice anything like that on your emails?

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience.

[hannamyluv]

Rumour has it that MSN (and hotmail) have been testing varations of spam filters to see which works best. Plus they just released that whole "pay-to-play" program where you can pay a bond to get all your email through. It would be in their best finacial intrest to tighten up the spam filters. You may have just gotten caught in the crossfire.

BTW, we just looked into the MSN email bond. Bad deal. $1000-$2000 down and they deduct $20 everytime they get a spam complaint. Might not be bad, but what is the definition of a spam complaint? You're guess is as good as mine.

[skuba]

That's what I thought. Now we will have to pay to send our emails, althouth it's not spam. 100% of our userbase has opted in.

[skuba]

Any other thoughts?

[blaze]

Microsoft last week said it adopted an e-mail program to protect the inboxes of its Hotmail and MSN services, which together claim 170 million regular users, by requiring marketers to put money up front if they wish to ensure their messages aren't mistaken for unwanted spam.

The MSN email bond isn't such a bad idea but I'm not sure why they need such a high value bond.

Why not just make it 40$ or something? Very odd.

I guess the problem is that the feedback loop must be too long.

Still, they could put the emails for new domains in cold storage and 'leak' them out to users slowly to get a sense of it's spam or not.

I think a lot of people are going to migrate away from hotmail to yahoo or gmail.. Good time for gmail to come out right about now.

[sunriseb]

Skuba,
I have had the same problems in the past and I found that here are several methods of getting around the spam filters. You should try a randomizer on your email list which essentially mixes it all up so that Hotmail & MSN do not receive large amounts of email from you at the same time. Also I don't know what your settings are on whatever software you are using to send in your email but if you are sending it using BCC then you need to optimize that setting. Another thing that helps is to personalize each email with the person's name in the subject line and/or within the first few lines of the email.

The spam filters are a really a series of filters that are looking at many variables in the emails including BCC, large quantities of email coming from the same IP address, repetitious subject lines, repetitious message bodies and repetitious from fields. Points are assigned for each of these they find...too many points and the email disappears into cyberspace.

I hope this helps.
sunriseb

[RedWolf]

One interesting exercise to see how filters works is to install Spam assassin on a domain and set the filtering level low like 1 or 2 for a test. Configure it to just mark the spam messages instead of deleting them and send yourself some email and watch the junk you get into the address anyway. Spam Assassin includes a summary of points against the email including a short description of what caused it to be flagged as spam. For example this is the report from something I just got in:

pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
0.2 EXCUSE_14 BODY: Tells you how to stop further spam
0.2 OFFERS_ETC BODY: Stop the offers, coupons, discounts etc!
0.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
0.8 REMOVE_PAGE URI: URL of page called "remove"
0.1 RCVD_IN_RFCI RBL: Sent via a relay in ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org
[211.245.28.125 has inaccurate or missing WHOIS]
[data at the RIR]
2.2 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
[Blocked - see <http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?211.245.28.125>]
0.0 CLICK_BELOW Asks you to click below
0.8 MSGID_FROM_MTA_HEADER Message-Id was added by a relay
1.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts

[skuba]

Guys, I use one of the top email programs, BlueHornet. Of course I don't send the emails with BCC.
The emails are all mixed up, not all hotmail accounts are together on the database. Also I do break down the database in 5 different groups.
I don't think this current hotmail filter is looking at copy of the email to determine if it's spam. Usually when this happens it just goes to the spam box. In my case they were bounced back.

As I said before, even when I sent one single email at a time, and with a clean no-spam copy it got bounced. It had to do with Hotmail's new policy. They won't allow bulk emailers to send their stuff unless they pay for it.
I guess that's it.