These e-mails are all real and also sent by addresses like azure@email.microsoft.com with the source SMTP server being in a subdomain of PROD.OUTLOOK.COM.
How comes that Microsoft would not just whitelist their own domains on their own e-mail service?
If they don't whitelist and the emails just land in spam without anyone taking notice, that reminds me more of the well-known slightly satirical image of Microsoft's org chart [1]
In other words: `*.notify.trafficmanager.net` is special-cased, and this has caused problems.
Does it really or does it just mean that nobody cared enough to do it for whatever reason?
I hope this refers to something behind the scenes that I as a Hotmail/Outlook user am unable to see. Because UI and product-wise, I don't see much evidence at all that someone of a good engineering culture cares about the experience I'm having with the product.
More like a team phoning it in.
My guess here is that some junk folder routing is on client side, or the user flagged junky email from the same infrastructure as junk. Or, O365 tweaked some settings to address the issues with spammers using Outlook infrastructure that bypasses spam controls.
They know these are legitimate emails though, so they should treat their presence in the spam folder as essentially a bug report.
Personally I'd say we have a limited bandwith to talk about prejudice in the public discourse. I'd rather we don't waste it away with useless remarks.
I can understand the difficulty in judging new domains, but having established, high value, high volume domains getting their email flagged as spam is ridiculous.
It could also be anti-competitive behaviour. They want the system to be a complex, opaque, black box because then it's more important for other providers to trust their IP ranges because they're a known-good participant. If you're a small sender that wants decent deliverability your options are Google, MS, etc..
"Your domain is about to expire, enter your Google username and password to renew it!"
If it was me, I'd pattern those emails to be exactly like the real ones. So then the real ones might get flagged by the spam filters too. You'd think they'd check who's sending them though (origin server)...
It's notorious that they have a hard time replicating products that competitors make look simple: look how the Steam store really works for for games, or how Dropbox works so much better than Onedrive.
The secret is that they aren't the same people.
Teams' bread and butter is being "good enough" for enterprise. And they're also locked into a lot of bad early decisions they made since they don't want to break compatibility for huge, paying customers of theirs. I feel like they have to be incredibly careful making changes to not step on toes in that regard, making development a slow-moving behemoth.
I just finished spending more hours than I want to count trying to clean my dad's PC of all licensing and account connections to his former employer's use of Office and OneDrive and onto his personal account and license. In hindsight I wish I had just nuked and paved it, or bought him an iPad with keyboard and mouse.
It's a fundamental problem of organizations operating across a wide variety of domains, because communication doesn't scale.
If you want your stock value to increase, profits has to too, so targeting the segment the most money is exchanged makes sense. But argh so boring.
https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&for...
A year or two ago, I did get Outlook to classify those emails as "Junk" automatically, by repeatedly reporting them - but then something changed, and after that they never were marked as "junk" again - no matter how often I do report them.
For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this.
Yep. There are situations where they'll simply ignore DMARC aligned messages if they don't like the content, filter them into (admin only) quarantine, and refuse to let you create rules for special cases so you receive important messages.
I know because I've had it happen.
Oh come on. Back when they first built Gmail, maybe sure.
But in the last 10 years or so? They’ve been totally ignoring the fact that they categorize their own non-marketing non-spammy emails, specifically requested on specific non-spammy topics by the user, generated by Google, and sent by Google, as spam. I don’t think they have worked harder than anybody on this. Snacked harder, maybe.
Most other companies seem interested in selling band-aids to repeated cuts than preventing the cuts in the first place.
We are seeing the initial skirmishes in a knock-down, drag-out war that users are going to lose.
In fact, the suggest that they should whitelist their own domains seems to be fairly monopolistic, something Microsoft has had to deal with in the past.
This seems appropriate and right, and not any indication of anything other than things work as they should.
Junk email classification seems to be hard for everyone. I've seen Apple and Google do similar things with their respective email clients and messages from their own companies.
At a previous job, we might have lost a significant contract if I hadn't been checking my Gmail junk folder. A former client was trying to contact me from a new company about potential work, and Gmail must have thought the start-up's domain was risky.
I attributed this to the sheer incompetence of the local admins. The same organization later switched to O365, and the problem remained unchanged.
It's an incredibly common problem. Super important email, like an outage is brewing, or they are EOL'ing something which is going to blow you up (like older TLS versions), and yeah, you got it, but you probably didn't read it.
I was losing a ton of important email because Microsoft would flag it as junk.
And even though I had complete admin rights over my tenant, I had no idea how to disable junk mail entirely.
(Also, fun fact, MS _still_ only gives you a 50GB mailbox! Google's at, like, a terabyte per user now...)
So for me they are spam and I will mark them as such. I'm on fastmail tho so not sure whether they get the feedback.
Maybe Microsoft has problems with people using Azure to send spam
Junk has a broad definition in outlook.com. It includes commercial emails too.
This is another reason why we use a third party filter and dial the MS one way down.
