You may have seen my post several weeks ago about how any emails I send from two of my email addresses (provided by my hosting account) go straight into the junk folder for any Hotmail recipients.

Now things have got even worse and my emails are getting rejected altogether by Hotmail. The support staff for my hosting have advised me that I need to get hold of the SMTP settings of my ISP (Virgin Media, UK) in order to fix it.

I don't understand how this could fix it though? My emails get rejected even when I use webmail through cPanel? So how would changing my SMTP settings in Thunderbird fix everything? Or do I need to add the SMTP settings somewhere else?

Also, I've tried googling for 'Virgin Media SMTP' but all I can find is help articles on actual Virgin Media email addresses!

If it helps, here is the rejection message I keep getting:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

hi_im_maff@hotmail.com
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<contact@freshbeat.co.uk> SIZE=1616:
host mx3.hotmail.com [65.55.92.152]: 550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Return-path: <contact@freshbeat.co.uk>
Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=abe.enixns.com)
by abe.enixns.com with esmtpa (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <contact@freshbeat.co.uk>)
id 1MaGAo-0004PF-4x
for hi_im_maff@hotmail.com; Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:43:26 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:43:26 +0100
From: <contact@freshbeat.co.uk>
To: hi_im_maff@hotmail.com
Subject: test
Message-ID: <3346bcd327811469d17ed2a03e5a1176@mattpealingdesig n.co.uk>
X-Sender: contact@freshbeat.co.uk
User-Agent: RoundCube Webmail/0.2
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

hello

just go to the horses mouth.

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/emai...express6-2.php

Thanks,
It's just hit me though, it will show up as an email from another address? i.e. Virgin? I don't actually have my own Virgin address, I use Gmail for my personal emails.

Does this mean that I'd have to use my Gmail address to send my business emails? Well, for Hotmail anyway, I think everything else is okay.

I've been tinkering about on Gmail by sending email from my business email address through Gmail itself. This seems great except for one thing...

From: pealo86@googlemail.com on behalf of Matt Pealing (contact@freshbeat.co.uk)

?????

I don't see the point in even using it if it's going to put that in the header. I don't suppose you know of a way to alter it?? Or does Gmail not let you?

Hmmm also, I've even added my business email into my hotmail contacts and my emails are still bouncing back. Not only that, but if I send an email to myself from my hotmail address, I receive the email. But then when I try to reply back to my Hotmail... it bounces back!

arrrghhhhh!

Could it be worth just switching to a different hosting company?

Hi, If iam understanding you correctly tou trying to send an email from your hosting account to hotmail. If you have a shared hosting account what may happen is that someone on the same server may have been involved into spmming activity or the server has been compromised and been sending out spam this will result in the ipaddress/domains on that server being black listed. You may want to check to see if your domain/ip is on blacklist I think you can check it here http://www.myiptest.com/staticpages/...d-domain-URIBL or just google "how to check if my domain on a black list"

Thanks! I've just had a look and everything seemed to check out okay... could it be that Hotmails blacklist isn't shown on that site?

Hotmail rely on their own methods of "spam detection" and don't use public blackhole lists.

Make sure the server you route mail through has reverse DNS.