Wow, no posts from me for 7 months and suddenly the muse is back. Although it is certainly triggered by difficulties I am having getting simple things done through others. I am trying hard though.
Microsoft Fails
This story requires a little bit of background about how email works. Hopefully you will find it interesting, the theme though is how Microsoft is unable to resolve what is relatively. a simple problem.
The background
When you send email from your desktop or mobile device it goes to a mail server associated with your email service (e.g hotmail, gmail, outlook). This is the senders mail server.
Using a process called MTA (mail transfer agent) or SMTP relay (mail transfer protocol relay) the senders mail server searches the internet for the recipients mail server location, using the internets Domain Name Servers (DNS) .
The recipient can have more than one mail server listed in DNS, a primary and one or more backups. The standard is for the MTA to select the recipients primary mail server first and only if it fails then the secondary or backup server is selected.
Microsoft Mail Server Behaves Like SPAM server
The Microsoft mail server always selects the backup or lower priority recipients mail server first even if the primary server is live. This is to avoid spam/junk mail filtering as typically the backup servers do not have such filtering in place (they are bare bones)
For major email service like Microsoft’s, this is a travesty. They are supporting the delivery of spam and junk mail. For comparison, gmail, yahoo, icloud and the majority of legitimate corporate mail servers use the primary mail server first when available.
Like a brick wall
I tried repeatedly over numerous support tickets (more than 5) to get Microsoft to acknowledge and adjust this inappropriate mail server behaviour, to no avail.
I have since advised the Canadian Government Anti- Spam agency about this is issue. Given it would have a world wide impact on reducing spam and junk email, I hope they take action but doubt anything will change