Hi all – just posting this here for more general reach! Unfortunately, at the moment we are unable to send automated emails to most users with Microsoft email domains (like Hotmail and Outlook). This is because Microsoft are blocking our sending IP as spam, and refusing to accept any emails. You won’t find these emails in your spam folder, because Microsoft are essentially blocking them at source.
All email providers do this kind of thing to help protect their users (and their own servers) from spam, but in this case Beeminder’s been flagged in this way.
We’re currently appealing this, and it may help for affected users to get in touch with Microsoft and let them know that they do want to receive emails from Beeminder, along with any impact it’s had on you. Or it may not… sometimes these processes are difficult to fathom.
We’ll work on it as best as we can, but even if we’re unblocked, we can’t promise we won’t be blocked again in future (Microsoft have been particularly prone to this in my general experience). In the meantime, you may want to swap to another email address for Beeminder, in order to ensure you receive all the emails you need to see from us.
Sorry about all this, if you’ve been affected! Emails to and from support are not affected, so please do reach out to us if you need to – we’re still here!
If you have derailments, just paste in the links to the affected goals and we’ll take it from there. It’s still best if you can let us know ASAP, to avoid getting charged.
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I don’t have all the info about the appeal process (which sounds like we got a reply saying there isn’t a block, despite the error messages from them saying there is) but I have started seeing some users with Hotmail addresses getting their emails from us again!
That may or may not apply to everyone, and may or may not be permanent, so I can’t promise this is the final update, but things do appear to be on the move now. We’d love to hear from you if you’re still missing emails you’re expecting, so we can check what the error messages are or whether there might be something else in play for you.
We’re also seeing that some users have specifically blocked (some of) our emails as spam, so we no longer try to send any kind of emails to them, to try to avoid this kind of situation where providers think we’re spammers. So let this be a moment for a quick PSA: if you’d like to stop receiving emails from us, please please please don’t mark them as spam – use the unsubscribe links/turn off reminders/etc, and let us know at support@beeminder.com if you’re having any isssues with that! Otherwise, it’s a reputational hit for us which might affect deliverability to other people as well, and we also may not be able to send you information and emails you do want to receive.
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I checked again today and it looks like emails to the Microsoft accounts and domains I checked are now going through okay!
If you’re still missing emails you’d have expected to receive, definitely let us know so that we can dig in.
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We are not aware of any further issues with emailing the majority of Microsoft email users at this time after I’ve been doing some monitoring and sanity checking. So I declare this issue closed for now!
Some Microsoft email users have marked our emails as spam, and they will continue to see non-delivery of emails, as we do not continue sending to users who marked us as spam. Such users can contact us to try to get emails resumed.
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