Hotmail delivery issues

[Xon]

Is anyone else experiencing weird transient "554 Transaction Failed" on MAIL FROM, aka when SMTP connects and defines the return-path/bounce handling address.

It appears to happen the most when full message text is sent on thread watches. Checking Hotmail's docos on improving email delivery it suggests that massive amounts of unopened email may trigger email to be failed to be delivered.

I think this is a case for reducing how often the watch thread/new conversation notifications are dispatched, and perhaps introducing image beacons to track notification emails being opened. And if a user is getting a lot of un-opened email notifications, automatically stop sending the damn things.

Note; talking to basic Hotmail support hasn't helped so far.

 

[Mr Lucky]

I had a similar bounce from hotmail today for a notification.


The user was getting notifications before and after this one so no apparent reason for it, unless as you suggest he wasn't opening the emails and that triggered something. He was opening most of them. However this one had the word "drugs" in the subject, maybe hitting a spam assassin?

 

[JulianD]

I just checked my server and it's delivering messages to hotmail just fine:

Feb 19 17:55:53 correo postfix/smtp[17907]: 89C65E012: to=<*********@hotmail.com>, relay=mx2.hotmail.com[65.54.188.94]:25, delay=5, delays=0.05/0.01/0.66/4.2, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250  <7a33bd2d3898d5d8467a13ee6a9b84457d51e44c@www.site.com> Queued mail for delivery)

 

[markku]

Is anyone else experiencing weird transient "554 Transaction Failed" on MAIL FROM, aka when SMTP connects and defines the return-path/bounce handling address.

It appears to happen the most when full message text is sent on thread watches. Checking Hotmail's docos on improving email delivery it suggests that massive amounts of unopened email may trigger email to be failed to be delivered.

I think this is a case for reducing how often the watch thread/new conversation notifications are dispatched, and perhaps introducing image beacons to track notification emails being opened. And if a user is getting a lot of un-opened email notifications, automatically stop sending the damn things.

Note; talking to basic Hotmail support hasn't helped so far.

Yep.

I don't recall how long we have had bounce handling for XF, but we did upgrade to the version that introduced it the day after release, and immediately set up bounce handling.

Not once, ever before, have we gotten 554 Transaction Failed on MAIL FROM (which XF treats "Soft Bounce").

This changed on February 7th, when we got the first one.

Since then we have gotten them frequently, not too much, but enough to catch our attention.

We've been in touch with our premium email provider and they did great work investigating it, but couldn't figure out the exact reason. They tried getting in touch with the Hotmail support, but those guys only referred to some useless postmaster site which didn't help the premium email provider guys at all. Not surprising, they told us that Hotmail is known for poor customer service in regard to email deliverability issues.

Let me know if you find anything...

 

[Xon]

We've been in touch with our premium email provider and they did great work investigating it, but couldn't figure out the exact reason. They tried getting in touch with the Hotmail support, but those guys only referred to some useless postmaster site which didn't help the premium email provider guys at all. Not surprising, they told us that Hotmail is known for poor customer service in regard to email deliverability issues.

SV does ~600-700 emails to Hotmail per day, but only half a dozen or so have experienced this. And I can't see any reason since often these notifications got to a bunch of people at once.

It just started happening around the early of February, I do think not sending full-message text appears to help. I use my Full Message Text Permission add-on, and a user promotion targeting Hotmail addresses so this only affects Hotmail users.

 

[Mr Lucky]

I just got a reply from mandrill support:

I have had our Delivery department look into this bounce response, however, from what they've been able to see so far, it looks like this is an issue with Microsoft since only Hotmail/MSN/Outlook domains are being affected by this particular error. Our delivery team will keep on researching to see if there's anything we can do to avoid this. Unfortunately there's nothing you can do on your end about this because this is an issue external to Mandrill, and we do not have an ETA on when this may be resolved.

 

[RobinHood]

What was the outcome @Mr Lucky?

I'm just happened to do a search for the following and it returned a massive percentage of my members

• Awaiting email confirmation
• Awaiting email confirmation (from edit)
• Email invalid (bounced)

It doesn't seem much or any of my email is getting through to hotmail/live users

 

[Mr Lucky]

What was the outcome @Mr Lucky?

I stopped using mandrill