Outlook.com trips over Google's spam blocking rules Emails from users with Outlook.com country domains may not be reaching Gmail addresses but fear not - Microsoft has a workaround. The problem, where users send email to a Gmail account and receive a terse response from Google that their message was blocked, has been acknowledged by Microsoft and a temporary solution issued: " …
I'm genuinely curious. I don't doubt that you are correct and that gmail is for you a wretched hive of scum and villainy. On the other hand, I use gmail and I receive all the emails I expect to receive -- order confirmations, emails from friends, etc. But surprisingly little spam. I even check my gmail spam folder from time to time to see if there is stuff there I might want to see. Nope mostly newsletters from clueless politicians who I wouldn't vote for even if I lived in their jurisdiction (which I don't), and obvious phishing attempts plus some advertising I have zero interest in. How is this possible? What do I need to do/not do to maintain this happy state of affairs?
Eh, so-so. I still get a number of spam messages from Gmail addresses being sent to my Gmail address. They get automatically sent to spam, but really - any message with an emoji as the first character of the title and talking about being a woman looking for a gullible good man is pretty obviously spam.
At least they finally, finally stopped the onmicrosoft.com spam.
Back when I herded email servers we had hotmail block us. Since all they did was to silently discard the emails a few of our customers were quite upset, since their email failed to reach the recipient. I could see that their incoming server accepted it in the logs, but then the message never reached the recipient. Hotmails suggestion? "Please restructure your server clusters such that they do not trigger our rules".
Microsoft and Google can fight over which one is too big to fail and too big to care.
While Microsoft hasn't quite cleaned up from that Russian invasion, they at least have an abuse department. The only way to fix Google spam is blocking Google. Reply-To: Google is always blocked. 2607:f8b0:4864:20::b41 and 2607:f8b0:4864:20::443 are permanently blocked because those seem dedicated to low reputation mail. Sometimes 2607:F8B0::/32 and 2a00:1450::/29 get blocked when I've had enough of Google telling me to fill out a form.
Over the last few weeks I have had a number of my clients expressing concern about emails from one of their email accounts not being immediately received by one of their other email accounts and have been advising (to keep it "simple") that email is not guaranteed to be delivered "immediately" and can in fact take hours, or days, depending on the email account they are checking, etc, etc
Some of these email accounts were Outlook or Gmail Accounts...
Based on this article I checked the email logs of one of the sites I support and found that since the beginning or March Gmail has been delaying emails for hours...
Failed attempts to send emails reported:
"421-4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating 421-4.7.28 from your IP Netblock [<redacted>]. To protect our users 421-4.7.28 from spam, mail sent from your IP Netblock has been temporarily rate 421-4.7.28 limited. For more information, go to 421-4.7.28 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to 421 4.7.28 review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines."
Needless to say the "Google Help" was not helpful - no mention of how to get around this "Netblock" issue :(
Based on this it is more likely that Gmail is the actual cause because someone has decided to prevent emails being accepted immediately if it is in some defined Netblock...
How big is this "Netblock"? 256 IP addresses? 65536? 16777216?
How are you supposed to fix an issue that is undefined?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
