Boycott of Hotmail

Boycott Originator

Elliander | Email this user

Boycott Title

Hotmail users unable to communicate with friends

Boycott Description

Recently Microsoft a comprehensive anti-spam effort that has resulted in the inability of hotmail users to communicate with those they wish to.

In the wake of this effort every single client of Dreamhost, including all domains and subdomains who are hosted by dreamhost, are now banned from sending e-mail to hotmail users.

As a result of this action a staggering number of honest companies who pay for their own Domain name, and maintain their own e-mail client, are unable to reply to questions sent to them by many of their customers. While at the same time, hotmail companies are obvlivious to the fact that many of their customers are trying to reach them.

The problem comes from the fact that nothing goes into a junk mail folder, and adding an e-mail address to a safe list makes no difference: Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to decide who you may or may not communicate with. They have made no efforts to distinguish between sources of spam and small companies.

While Hotmail users may still send mail to anyone they like, they don't even know that Microsoft is doing this to them. It also constitutes a severe invasion of Privacy because when a company is contacting Microsoft to resolve the issue they require that this company disclose entire e-mails sent as part of their evaluation. A company is left with the difficult position of loosing buisness by not being able to communicate, or loosing buisness by violating it's own privacy policy.

If hotmail doesn't give it's own clients the choice of what e-mail to accept, and the choice to look at a misreported e-mail and say it is not spam, then hotmail is of no use to anyone.

Boycott Demands

We hereby demand that Hotmail lifts the Ban on company mailservers. Even if the action is meant as a cost effective means of stopping spam from one or two domains, the indiscriminate banning of thousands of Domains only serves undermine the usefulness of hotmail as a means of communicating. Banning a range of thousands of domains is not part of a comprehensive anti-spam strategy.

We further demand that even in the case where Hotmail has good reason to believe that a given domain is a source of spam, that any user of hotmail can override that Ban by adding the  e-mail address to a safe list.

We the undersigned insist on the rights of the user to decide whom we may or may not communicate with. Until this issue is resolved, not only will we not use hotmail but we will notify everyone we know about the issue so that they too can make an informed decision.