Strike 2 for hotmail, besides dumping millions of emails into a black hole without telling anyone they have now disabled links in even plain-text emails. On top of that If you’re sending mail from a “new” IP address, that mail is automatically treated as spam and dumped in the bulk folder.
Yes, even one-to-one email from an IP with no previous record of problems.
Yesterday I sent out an email to all my UK subscribers informing them of an almost free workshop I am doing in Bristol this weekend (just £10 for 4 hours of valuable face to face instruction) and every hotmail and MSN email bounced back with a content rejected error message because I used a new URL www.weblearningzone.co.uk
If you must use a free web-based email service, I suggest Yahoo or Gmail. (Gmail no longer requires invitations, by the way.) They’re both a lot friendlier to people who actually want to get email at their email addresses.
Please consider this a public service announcement and check all your subscriptions and memberships to make sure you are actually getting the email you asked for.
Gmail is by far the best free email provider out there. It also has the most accurate filters I have ever seen. If you use Gmail you will never have to use those pesky alert services either like spam arrest.
I
have not only a testimonial for LFM, but for Robert too. I didn't meet Robert
until last October. I have a feeling if I had met him earlier, I'd had been working a lot less a
long time ago. 
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the heads up about this.
By the way, Alex Jeffreys who runs Easy Profit Auctions has just told me in his forum that he will be attending your workshop on Saturday.
See you then,
Graham
I agree with you Rob.
Hotmail sucks. But I’ve also found messups with Yahoo Mail, too.
I once sent an email blast, and had a fake yahoo mail to test it. I didn’t even get my email blast to my fake account for three days.
So, I only recommend Gmail to my subscribers, since Gmail is quick and their spam filter is not so damn tough.
Hi Rob,
I wanted to go to one of your workshops, the one at Maidenhead, however when I tried to pay for it there was no way that I could as you use an American payment processor that doesn’t recognise European debit cards or Paypal. I sent a request to your support page and checked it every day for two weeks but never got a response. As I couldn’t pay and there was no obvious means of contacting you I could not go. I use Yahoo and generally it is very good so I do not think that I could have missed a reply but there was nothing on your site so I assumed that it was semi orphaned as so many are these days.
I hope the people who could attend got something out of it and I am pleased that someone actually got round to doing workshops in the UK but I am disappointed that they are not available to all.
Regards
John
John
The site uses paypal as a payment processor you shouldn’t have had a problem paying.
Robert
[...] You can see it at robertpuddy.com/hotmail-does-it-again [...]
Hotmail does it again
Robert Puddy explains why you should not use hotmail and not accept them in your autoresponders.
Totally agree with you. Hotmail is just far too problematic – and you still get a lot of spam.
I’ve been using Gmail for 3 years (and have 99 now useless invititations), and have never had a major problem with it. Email usually gets to me in a couple seconds, plus even with 3 years of news, newsletters, and backup zip files of data saved in my account, I’m only using one quarter of my storage quota.
My only qualm with it is some of my newsletters occassionally land in the spam folder. No biggie – I just teach Gmail that it’s not spam and it never does it again.
Hello Robert, I feel your pain. Truly, Gmail is the best.
I wanted to make a suggestion, Instead of having lots of those pesky bookmark buttons up there, why don’t you use one widget – Addthis.com and make it more neater.
Just a tip