I agree with you completely! I also understand how your situation is different than the one of the poster to whose message I replied: He was at least getting his messages accepted by the receiving server, though they were being routed to the spam folder of the user.
Obviously, the common “workaround” I suggested for him does not help you at all, as the mail is just ignored.
The most frustrating part of all this, is that there is ultimately very little Dreamhost can do about it; the problem rests with Hotmail.
Sure, DH can lobby Hotmail, jump through hoops to meet Hotmail’s requirements (at least “today’s” requirements that can change on a daily basis), make life harder for anyone (including all of us!) to send legitimate email from our domains in attempt to thwart spammers (they have already started limiting the number of emails that can be sent from a user in a limited period of time), and on and on ad nauseum.
However, at the end of the day, Hotmail will decide to accept or reject mail from whomever they please. Only their users bitching loudly, and in large numbers, has any chance of havng a significant impact on them.
All I know to do at this point, is to continue to battle spam wherever you encounter it, make sure you have postmaster and abuse address set up for your domain, encourage DH to get their (tested, but withdrawn) SPF stuff working, code your scripts securely, and roll with the blows - IMHO, This is gonna get much worse before it gets any better.
The same suggestions I made previously may have some impact for you: Be up-front about the problem with those you email , and encourage them to provide you with an email address that accepts your mail. etc.
I can easily imagine the day when DH says, “screw it! We are a hosting provider, not an email service, and we don’t need this crap!” Which will complicate life for all of us, as we will need to arrange an alternate email provider, and just hope they don’t suffer the same fate at the hands of these fascist email providers. If reliably getting essential or mission critical email sent and received is imperative for you, I believe, as other users have pointed out before on this forum, you should arrange a seperate commercial email provider, as hosting service domains running under dynamic IP addresses are likely to see this problem only get worse. It is not fair to say it is DH’s fault, or responsibility (past the point of actively policing spam from their domains), as some of these email providers have been known to block whole ranges of ISP’s dynamic IP addresses, or block whole providers’ subscriber bases.
There is a lot of further discussion on this issue all over the web, and in this forum, if you are really interested; but I’d advise against holding your breath for DH, or any other hosting company, to be able to solve it easily for us. Email is changing, some say it is already “dead” and this is just one of the reasons.
I’ really don’t want to sound so discouraging, but it “is” what it “is”. Education, in general, would help but, since the “commercialization” of the internet, the mass infection of the internet by AOL’ers and other clueless/malicious types running amok without a trace of understanding of, or respect for, “netiquette”, email as we know it has been headed down the same path as usenet: toward being meaningless as a useful tool.
It’s a big subject, and I’ve rambled on long enough. I just felt like sharing a little “perspective” on the “bigger picture”.
–rlparker
