In a move that could alienate it from a lion's share of free e-mail account holders, Web host GaltGroup Internet Services
has turned its back on Windows Live Hotmail -- as well as all the products, services and partners of Hotmail's parent company,
Microsoft.
The boycott was said to have been sparked by e-mail delivery problems between GaltGroup and some of its customers who were
also Hotmail users. Despite having sent legitimate, authenticated messages, GaltGroup found that Hotmail's spam filters had
been directing its e-mail messages past users' inboxes, spam and trash folders, to be destroyed without any notice to either
the sender or intended recipient.
"It is analogous to the letter-carrier just deciding to throw away your letters, and not even telling you or the person who
sent it," said Laura Brownlee, GaltGroup's chief marketing officer.
"I don't believe they [Hotmail] specifically target us, but rather we fall into some category of 'things their filters dislike',"
she said. "As we are unable to reliably deliver e-mail to Hotmail and reliable email delivery is vital for billing, we simply
cannot afford to take the risk to customer satisfaction that Hotmail presents."
GaltGroup no longer accepts registrants using Hotmail or MSN e-mail address. Instead, it directs potential customers to sign
up for Google's free e-mail service, Gmail.
According to Ashley Friedlein, chief executive officer and cofounder of U.K. e-commerce research group E-consultancy, deliverability
problems extend beyond Hotmail to other large Web mail providers also.
Friedlein explained that some country domains, like Russia, are typically treated more harshly by spam filters, because of
the volumes of spam known to originate from servers in those countries. Other servers are tagged as likely spammers by spam
filters because of the number of e-mails they send within a certain time period.
"Deliverability is a real headache. It's not just Hotmail, but the other large webmail companies too - Yahoo!, AOL, Google,
etc," he said. "If you send above a certain threshold you immediately get them all junked as 'spam'."
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