Bouncing Emails

The receiving account servers may have the IP address used by your Outlook account flagged as a SPAM source, in which case the mail is sent to the intended recipient's junk mail box. It will sit there for a week or ten days, then be purged from the junk folder if the recipient doesn't bother to have a look at the junk mail folder. The recipient may or may not be aware that the server has flagged your IP address as suspicious.

I have encountered a situation where my hotmail contacts list was highjacked by some spammers (most likely through some trick in Instant Messenger, based on my analysis of the situation), and subsequently my e-mail address was recorded by some servers as suspicious. I did not discover this until certain correspondents complained of not receiving specific e-mails from me.

Apparently, different firewalls use different criteria for flagging malicious e-mail.

Thanks. Sounds like a reasonable explantion for the time delay. What can I do about it? What do I tell the recipient (using my Earthlink account to reach him)? Is this something that's fixable at his end?

In the case where my e-mails were being blocked, the recipient had access to the firewall that had flagged me as a source of junk, and he was able to over ride that. If the recipient is on a network where the IT department has control over the firewall software, it may not be so easy. I would suggest calling this to the attention of your recipients first of all. If the communication is sufficiently important to them, they will figure out how to unblock it. Otherwise, you may be wasting your effort sending them your updates...

It may help to send from the Earthlink account an email to the 12 failed recipients a seperate email that says please add the following email to your contacts list. This will sometimes let the email server know on their end that you're not a spammer. At least this is the case with (out of other things I've run into) Yammer. Hope this helps!

Most of the servers treet frequent mails with "Unknown ..." in To: or no contact in it.

And some one may also send you the warning.