[sent to journalists on Peacefire's press contacts list;
RISKS saw it in a forwarding of a message from Monty Solomon]
We recently discovered that for the last five months, HotMail has been
blocking their users from sending e-mail to peacefire.org addresses. If you
tried to send mail to a peacefire.org address from HotMail, you'd get a fake
error message a day later saying that there was a problem on the recipient's
end -- when it was really HotMail blocking the message from being delivered.
HotMail is part of the same boycott that AboveNet was part of, when AboveNet
was blocking their downstream users from accessing our Web site. After our
ISP owner complained, HotMail stopped blocking their users from e-mailing us
and other Media3 customers.
HotMail is still, however, blocking their users from e-mailing other sites
on their "boycott list". I've talked to several of our members who are
using HotMail, and most of them are furious that HotMail would be censoring
their outgoing mail without telling them.
Again, the irony is that HotMail didn't single us out for anything, we just
happened to be in the same IP address block as other sites that were the
original target of the boycott (e.g. ListSorcerer.com). When our ISP,
Media3, didn't kick them off, the boycott organizers expanded the "boycott
list" to include hundreds of unrelated sites also hosted by Media3.
Several HotMail members that I talked to, have said they would be willing
to talk to the press about HotMail blocking their outgoing mail. Many of
them said they never would have signed up with HotMail if they knew their
mail would be blocked, and some have even said that they're going to
switch to another mail service. (Especially since HotMail is *still*
blocking outgoing mail -- it was just our IP address block that they
exempted from the list.)
-Bennett
bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org
(425) 649 9024
- - --
The Telecom Digest is currently mostly robomoderated. Please mail
messages to editor@telecom-digest.org.
[Incidentally, for the mailing of RISKS-21.21, bigfoot.com blocked
the mailing to every subscriber there, because of the number of
subscribers exceeding some spam limit. Too bad. Perhaps they won't
get this message either, letting them know what happened, although we
are trying a different mail configuration for this issue! PGN] [Bennett Haselton via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 22]
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