Posts Tagged ‘Hotmail’

Hotmail and fotoLibra

August 7th, 2014
Gwyn Headley

by Gwyn Headley

Managing Director

This is getting beyond a joke.

Yesterday our web editor Jacqui Norman sent out a Picture Call to all our contributors. Nearly 50,000 photographers have signed up to fotoLibra since we started ten years ago. When people leave, we remove their names from our mailing list.

Yet Jacqui’s simple request for images to be purchased by a long-established and reputable British magazine, paying fair prices, has not reached 3,850 of our contributors because Hotmail has classed it as spam.

They are preventing us from communicating with members who have voluntarily signed up to fotoLibra’s services.

How can they do that?

They just can. Some Hotmail computer in Seattle noticed a small company in Britain was sending out 3,850 emails to Hotmail subscribers once a fortnight, and arbitrarily blocked it.

Nobeody read the emails. Nobody checked the content. Nobody asked the sender (that’s us) what on earth it thought it was doing, emailing nearly 4,000 Hotmail members. It just blocked us.

That’s harming its own subscribers more than it harms us, because it’s our Hotmail members who are deprived of submitting images to the Picture Call. People who use other email suppliers get to see the Picture Call, submit their images and will no doubt make sales.

But Hotmail subscribers won’t get that chance. That’s tough on them.

And exasperating for us.

 

 

 

 

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Gwyn Headley

by Gwyn Headley

Managing Director

We have been deluged by junk mail over the past few days, even more than usual, and as Yvonne has a migraine I’m checking her emails as well.

I thought I got bombarded with junk — but she gets twice as much. She was sent over a thousand between midnight and nine am.

Anyway, this morning Jacqui Norman sent out four Picture Calls to our members (who sign up voluntarily — there is little or no coercion) and loads of them came bouncing back, all with email addresses ending in yahoo.com — Delivery temporarily suspended: host mx2.bt.mail.yahoo.com[195.60.116.133] refused to talk to me: 424 4.6.0 [TS02] and other such impenetrable computer speak.

If I’d signed up for a service like fotoLibra and didn’t hear anything more from them, I’d be inclined to think the company didn’t care. It wouldn’t occur to me that my service provider was blocking messages from them. It’s damaging to us, but I’m at a loss as to know how to deal with it.

The prime offenders are Yahoo, Hotmail and BTInternet. We even have a note in our Welcome email to new members that if they use one of those service providers for their email, the should add mailman@fotoLibra.com to their address book. Even that doesn’t always work, but it helps a little bit.

We’ve tried contacting the companies direct, however we have but a limited life span on this earth and I don’t intend to spend it listening to ‘Fur Elise’ played on a Stylophone. These are companies that are not comfortable talking to customers or other outsiders.

Maybe they have Google Alerts when their names get mentioned frequently. So, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, how do we become an acceptable entity in your eyes?

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