If you use Hotmail

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

This has driven me a little nuts for a long time: People who use Hotmail will write to me, I answer, they write to me again wondering why I haven't responded, and I write to them again. Eventually, I have to give up because there's no way of contacting them. Why? Because Hotmail uses strong spam filtering, which boils down to blocking everything the person hasn't manually given the OK to. I've done a search on the problem, and found it's widespread, so if you use Hotmail, be aware that, unless you look in the junk folder every day and unless you mark addresses you want to receive from as being safe, you're probably missing stuff, and some of it could be important.

Barbara

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

Actually I think there's a setting for that. At least the way my account is set up, it won't block everything by default. It does use a variety of methods to detect spam but if it uses a "whitelist only" approach, that's new and I don't think it does.
Dick

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

What sent me off on the rant was trying to communicate with a customer who uses Hotmail. The poor person couldn't download because of not receiving the download email. Looking for it in the junk mail section reaped absolutely nothing. Also, the only way I could communicate was to send plain text messages. Anything that was HTML-based (simple rich text format) disappeared into the ether. I was stunned by this and so went on a research trip, discovering a chart that showed what Hotmail won't accept. Some of the things were exceedingly basic. Eventually, we managed it when I included a text-based URL for download. The person decided it was time to go over to Gmail.

Barbara