Vivaldi webmail service blocked by Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail, Live)
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@vivalausa It's not unique to Vivaldi. It's something that happens with a provider of free email service is not sufficiently successful in blocking spammers from opening up free accounts hosted by them and using them to send spam. Vivaldi has instituted mobile phone SMS verification to help stem the tide of spammers opening and using Vivaldi mail accounts, but some still get through. And when they do, this is the result.
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@ayespy Can you say that you've personally had some other Email Service Providers who have exhibited the same issue? If so, do you recall some of the others?
From my experience, all I can say is out of the 15 different Email Service Providers I've used (including Vivaldi) - I cannot personally recall any other Email Service Providers that have had this same specific issue.
If as you say the goal of MMS verification service is to restrict spamming - I'm not sure how my specific Vivaldi account would be impacted such as it is.
Taking a look at how many "Sent" messages I have in my Vivaldi account -- what I find over a period of 2+ years (from 1/31/2020 - 3/2/222) a total of only 44 "Sent" messages are in my account and virtually none of those "Sent" messages had more than one recipient in the message (let me check to be sure - okay, 3 of the 44 actually had two recipients the remaining 41 all had one recipient).
It seems to me a history of "Sent" messages such as this should not in any way be raising suspicions of sending spam (or am I missing something?) And then of course all of this begs the question as to why are only (certainly in my case) MS Email accounts impacted?
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@VivaLaUSA No I've never had any of the bounce-back e-mails you have received. My "lost" messages were always silently-dropped with no notification to either sender or recipient, and no diversion to the recipient's spam/junk folder.
@Ayespy If I interpret your response correctly, Vivaldi had (at some point in the past) an issue with spammers creating fake accounts, and it's been dealt with. Presumably, if you as a moderator are able to escalate this to someone on the Vivaldi team who can contact Microsoft, this might get resolved... But I still suspect MS are just using this as an excuse to bully smaller competitors, much like they've always done. I know that they attempted exactly this twice with Disroot, acknowledging the block but explicitly refusing to state why it was put in place. Apparently, this is a common occurrence (useful link: Microsoft hostility | Disroot)
I wonder if it would be useful for any affected users to repeatedly contact Microsoft and keep badgering them about it...
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@vivalausa @jamesbeardmore Vivaldi.net Email addresses are not being blocked. The entire domain is being blocked. In this case, by Microsoft.
Yes, I had it happen to me with another free email provider in the past (mail.com). They got this more under control by putting in automated source-point monitoring, but then the also put in an annual fee, and then later a monthly fee. I dropped my account. At present, every one of my email addresses except for vivaldi.net is hosted by a pay-for service except GMail, and no one blocks the GMail domain as spam. One reason for this is that Google both blocks users from emailing to "too many" (I don't know how many "too many" is, but when trying to notify my client list that I was dropping my inbox.com email address, I hit the limit and the mail was never sent) recipients at once and by pro-actively monitoring account-holder behavior - something Vivaldi will not be a party to.
Vivaldi management may or may not be able to prevail upon Microsoft to stop doing it. As a "partner" (Bing default search engine) with Microsoft, they might have more of a voice than some random guy on the street, but the amount of income Vivaldi provides to Microsoft by distributing Bing is something that company could lose and neither know nor care. So I don't know how much sway Vivaldi brass will have with Microsoft.
The SMS verification step Vivaldi put in place to reduce spam may or may not have "solved" the problem, but as Microsoft is blocking us, it obviously has not been entirely successful.
Vivaldi buys their "free" webmail service at substantial cost from Roundcube. Roundcube has some pretty restrictive limits on how many emails an account may send out at once, and how many copies to different addresses an email may be sent within an hour or a day. This should help prevent vivaldi.net from being used/blocked as spam - and yet it still happens. Microsoft are not the first to do it.
I can elevate the issue to community managers and see what can be done, but Microsoft does unreasonable and illogical crap all the time to "protect users" and won't always admit they are doing it, so I can't guarantee what results might obtain.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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Dealing with spammers is a constant struggle for all free email services, including us. Spammers have countless methods and strategies for spamming. When we block their activities, they will always come back with new ways to continue what they're doing. The better we are at dealing with spammer accounts, the more valuable a target we actually become. That's because when our mail servers have a better reputation, their spam is more likely to be delivered successfully. It's an endless cycle.
At the same time, we have to make sure that the methods we have in place to prevent spam don't affect real users. The SMS verification requirement was received with mixed feelings by our users, but it did have a big positive impact on limiting the amount of users with malicious intentions using Vivaldi Webmail. That method, like most others, helps to decrease the amount of spam, not eliminate it altogether.
In addition to dealing with outgoing spam, email services have to deal with incoming spam as well. One way to block incoming spam is to just not accept any emails from the sending domain. That's what Microsoft is doing. They wouldn't dare to block the highly popular services, such as Gmail, even though they are also used by spammers, but blocking small ones, like Vivaldi, is an easy option for them.
That's what the "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" message in @VivaLaUSA post means. We of course ask to be delisted as soon as we discover that we're blocked, but we never know, how long it will take. -
@ayespy said in Sent messages do not reach recipient account:
Vivaldi buys their "free" webmail service at substantial cost from Roundcube. Roundcube has some pretty restrictive limits on how many emails an account may send out at once, and how many copies to different addresses an email may be sent within an hour or a day.
@Ayespy, I'm not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. Roundcube is just the web UI for Vivaldi Webmail. It's free and open source and we have no costs when it comes to that. Also, we control all the limits in the email service.
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@jane-n My mistake. I did not realize that Vivaldi was literally hosting its own webmail. Heck - there's both a hardware and a bandwidth cost just doing that. But I thought Roundcube was a service, not merely an interface, as more than one source talks about Roundcube mail sending limitations, how to expand them, and how to get around them. Certainly, they do have a service as well, and I mistakenly thought that's what Vivaldi was using.
Doing a bit more homework, I see that they offer webmail client software as their primary activity.
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@vivalausa Problem continues, we can not send emails from vivaldi to hotmail (6 march 2022)
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@vivalausa What was happening was that Microsoft was literally blocking the vivaldi.net domain. They were contacted by Vivaldi brass more than once to try to resolve the issue.
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Yes, this blocking is still going on.Unable to email my kids who use outlook and hotmail.
Get this message:
Remote-MTA: dns; hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [ xxx] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of
their network is on our block list (S3150). -
This post is deleted! -
A couple of recent mails to hotmail and outlook.com were rejected.
outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104.47.14.33] said: 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [31.209.137.12] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3150). You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
[VI1EUR04FT009.eop-eur04.prod.protection.outlook.com] (in reply to MAIL FROM command)
Blog • Vivaldi Review • Server Status
Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486 • Snapshot 7.4.3671.3 (64-bit) -
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@pesala said in Undeliverable Mails:
Unfortunately, messages from [31.209.137.12] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3150).
Uhhhmmm...
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We have joined Microsoft's SNDS (Smart Network Data Service) and Junk Mail Reporting Programs, and we're having a discussion with Microsoft to solve the issue. Unfortunately, it's taking longer than any of us would like.
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We finally have some good news. Microsoft is no longer blocking Vivaldi.net!!
Though, they did say that it might take up to 48 hours for things to go fully back to normal.We're very sorry that those needing to correspond with Microsoft email users had to experience this issue and we're very thankful for your patience.
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Hi everyone, allow me to follow up on this thread as my email to an outlook address has been rejected yesterday. Any tip on what to do since now Microsoft is not blocking Vivaldi anymore?
Below part of the error message. Thanks in advance for any guidance!
Unfortunately, messages from [31.209.137.12] weren't sent.
Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network
is on our block list (S3150). You can also refer your provider to
http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
[HE1EUR04FT021.eop-eur04.prod.protection.outlook.com] (in reply to MAIL
FROM command) -
Unfortunately, the good news I shared in my last post didn't last long
as Vivaldi emails are indeed blocked again from reaching user's who have an email address from Microsoft. I'll let you know as soon as I have any news about the issue.Thank you for being so patient with us.
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As of a few moments ago I also could not send mail to an Outlook account, though I was able to send one to a Gmail account. I was using the web mail and received an email saying my message was not sent, with the error code 550. 7.1.
