« "What's a Blog, and Why Should Nonprofits Care?" | Main | Mad Professor » Should Bill Gates Control Your Email?South by Southwest Interactive asked participants in the upcoming conference what they think of Bill Gates' idea of "a caller ID for email," which will soon become a feature of Hotmail. Rich MacKinnon of Less Networks, which provides a backbone for free wireless hotspots in Austin, posts an interesting response. Less Networks uses email for confirmation of registration on its system, an after quite a bit of research, Rich discovered that Hotmail users weren't getting the messages. Actually finding a Hotmail contact required more research; it wasn't clear from the site how to reach someone who can actually have an effect on this kind of problem. Rich did track someone down, and she said at first that Hotmail wouldn't dump email without explanation. After some tests, she changed her story: the Less Network Confirmation had been blocked by "a filter deployed to stop unsolicited email." Remember, this is a system that sends confirmation emails to people who signed up, i.e. it sends only emails that are explicitly solicited by the recipient. How to get out of this mess? Microsoft is evaluating a third party "Bonded Sender Program," which means Rich could pay a fee and post a bond, and there would be a better chance that the emails would get through - but still no guarantee. [Link] Okay, so after four weeks of dealing with user complaints and investigation, we are introduced to the Bonded Server Program. This is a program that requires us to pay an application fee, plus post a bond in case of infraction. These fees are not insignificant. Also recall that the emails in question are false-positives--they are being sent on behalf of Hotmail users requesting registration confirmation. Even worse, they are not being sent to a "spam folder", they are dumped. The Hotmail user never has the opportunity to screen them. The Hotmail person said there was no way to address the false-positives, so I had either pay for the chance to send email to Hotmail users or deal with the dumped email. How many thousands of Hotmail emails have been lost in other similar cases where the service providers or the users didn't have the persistence to track down this problem? jon posted this at 11:07 AM |
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Comments
Jon,
the only answer for this kind of stuff is EXPOSURE. Why do people use hotmail in the first place? It's because they want to get e-mail and if they knew they couldn't, and were offered a viable alternative, I bet they'd start to switch. If Hotmail users were made aware at the time they were registering with Lessnetworks of the fact that they were essentially unreachable, that they were being treated as second class internet citizens, by Hotmail and at the same time told WHERE they could sign up for better FREE e-mail service perhaps, they would switch.
Lessnetworks should make that abundently clear on their registration page and offer links elsewhere for free e-mail. They, you, we should start a boycott of Hotmail - don't try to pacify them or pay tribute just expose them. Just like you are doing now, lets continue to make sure the world hears about it.
Regards,
Bobby Lilly
Posted by: Bobby Lilly | February 26, 2004 1:23 PM