Hotmail whitelist

[undyingking]

Anyone out there use Hotmail and can tell me how a (naive) user goes about whitelisting an address (ie. declaring it "safe" such that emails from this address are not to be treated as junk in future)?

Edited to clarify: I do not use Hotmail myself. I have a friend who does. This friend is seeing messages from a particular contact going in the junk. I want to be able to tell them how to avoid this happening.

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, the short answer is "don't use Hotmail." More seriously, Hotmail's servers will occasionally throw fits of silently dropping emails from the outside world, despite purporting to accept them (I have logs... many of them). About the only reliable way of getting mail through seems to be to reply to an email sent from the Hotmail user concerned. What the user may or may not have set in any kind of whitelist doesn't actually seem to matter.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

(I note that, from the sounds of things, your contact is getting the relevant mails but they're being misfiled as junk -- I'm not sure HM actually have a functional whitelist as such, since I've seen mails going astray even when sent to an address which I'm fairly sure would have them whitelisted.)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I second the "don't use Hotmail". Not only is it not good, it doesn't even work (based on the frequency with which messages routed via my server to Hotmail are bounced or simply vanish after delivery).

If the user has exposed the Hotmail address directly to the outside world (rather than forwarding from a domain they own, which is always preferable) the best solution to migration pains is to shift across in two stages. First, register a domain and redirect the mail to Hotmail. Then switch the redirect to your email system of choice (GMail/Googlemail being probably the best online option) once a sufficiently large proportion of contacts seem to have switched over to the new address.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

As someone who does use hotmail for historical reasons, I can confirm that the answer is indeed: you can't.

You can whitelist people which means that their messages don't get filed in the junk folder by their second level filters, but you can't stop them being silently trashed by earlier filters.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

You can whitelist people which means that their messages don't get filed in the junk folder by their second level filters

That would probably do for now -- how do you do that?

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Options -> Safe and Blocked Senders -> Safe Senders

then enter email address in box, and click "Add to list"

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Aha, great, thanks, I'll pass that on.

You haven't had a chance to look at that Mac Mail thing I was asking about a few weeks ago, I suppose? You sent me the HTML page as an email just fine, so I was after a description of how you'd composed it.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I thought I had. That was just a copy-and-paste of the web-page into the email.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Excellent, thanks!