An interesting trend has been observed by quite a few people on Apple's message boards. Seems Microsoft's Hotmail servers are not properly passing emails sent from people using Mail.app. It is not an isolated case and has been ongoing for quite some time. A user will send an email via one email client (Thunderbird, for instance) and it will go through fine, but an identical email sent via Mail.app just disappears into the ether.The only good news here is that Microsoft appears to be aware of the problem (according to some ISP's) and is working on a fix.
Update: One work-around (as posted in the link provided above, and by Tim below) is this. If you're having this problem, send an email to yourself with the recipient's email address in the CC field. The email to you won't come through but the copy sent via the CC field will. No idea why, but it seems to work.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-24-2005 @ 7:23PM
enano275 said...
Woah! That's scary, I don't want my e-mails to be lost. I have a question... is it all e-mails sent from Mail using a Hotmail account? or just every e-mail sent from Hotmail to Hotmail using Mail?
Reply
10-24-2005 @ 7:50PM
Tim Gaden said...
Maybe you should post the work-around as well?
Reply
10-25-2005 @ 12:35AM
CW said...
I use outlook express for email on my PC (Sorry, waiting for new Intel Powerbook for Mac) and when I use gmail to hotmail it doesn't work. It refuses the email "doesn't recognize domain name". Done this multiple times to multiple addresses. BS is what it is, they really should be sued for that kind of stuff.
Reply
10-25-2005 @ 12:48AM
Wheels said...
Could it be because people are sending RTF mail from Mail.app? I know that I had trouble sending emails with attachments to my friend on AOL, but when I told mail to send all my mail as plain text, the trouble stopped. Also, the majority of my family uses hotmail {cringe}, and my mail has always been delivered.
Reply
10-25-2005 @ 1:26AM
Paul Wren said...
Here's a work-around: Invite your friends and family to dump Hotmail for a GMail account. That should do it!
Oh, and if you need an invitation, let me know. I still magicaly have 100 inviatations left, even though I've handed out several.
Reply
10-25-2005 @ 3:38AM
Heather said...
And here I thought my friends just didn't like me anymore! Turns out it's Hotmail/MSN - at least I knew I didn't like them! I've had numerous emails go missing to both Hotmail and MSN addresses. It really is absurd. Can't help but wonder how purposeful some of these "bugs" are....
Reply
10-25-2005 @ 4:58AM
TriangleJuice said...
Also, when your mail does make it through the Microsoft firewall and you get a reply, Microsoft translates your old message as plain HTML code.
I made a work-around for this as an automator action:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/cleanhotmailmessageinmail.html
Reply
10-25-2005 @ 6:34AM
Matt King said...
Freaky! I was just looking into this problem as I had realised that my emails dissappear when sent to a Hotmail account. Came across this article by pure fluke!
As well as the cc hack mentioned earlier it also doesn't seem to wipe out your email if it is a reply to a Hotmail email sent to you.
Reply