Evidently msn.com and hotmail.com are blocking mail from comcast.net (or, possibly, from one server on comcast.net). This has been going on for a day or more, with no relief in sight.
Which makes my replying to messages from (or including CCed) those domains problematic, since that’s our ISP. *sigh*
One manual work-around for msn.com addresses is changing them to email.msn.com.
(Comcast gets minimal kudos for the above link, btw, since it shows up in their e-mail FAQ, which is the last place I’d look, or in their security forums, which is hardly where the average user would go.)
Anyway, just so you know (if you’re possibly afflicted on either end of the equation).
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The official word from Comcast, as of this morning (in the forum thread mentioned above):
To all,
The latest news we have been given on the MSN/Hotmail issue mentioned above is that some email is now getting through. You may still experience intermittent errors when sending to MSN/Hotmail but the volume of these messages in the email queue is decreasing so the errors should clear up very soon.
Many of you have speculated at the cause of this issue and in an attempt to set the record straight, what happened was that the MSN/Hotmail team made a change to their email system late last week which resulted in Comcast and several other ISPs to experience errors delivering emails to MSN/Hotmail. These intermittent errors caused the email queue on the Comcast mail servers to reach excessive levels as our mail servers continued to repeatedly try to deliver email to MSN/Hotmail. As a result of this high email queue of MSN/Hotmail messages, messages destined for other domains was starting to be affected so Comcast placed a temporary block on emails destined for MSN/Hotmail late on Oct 18th. This block resulted in not allowing any new emails destined for MSN/Hotmail to reach the outbound email queue so Comcast.net users were seeing the bounce-back error message. Late on Oct 19th, MSN did reconfigure their email servers which did allow them to start accepting email from the Comcast mail server queue and the block that Comcast implemented on our system has been lifted.
So for now, it is safe to re-try sending to MSN/Hotmail accounts but if you do receive an undeliverable error, please wait for 30 minutes or longer and try again. The email queues will eventually take the messages but right now they are at very high levels so repeated attempts within a short period of time will not help to get your messages out but waiting a significant amount of time before re-trying may yield better results.
This issue is not fully resolved at the time of this posting but we are continuing to communicate with the MSN/Hotmail team to further understand the cause of this issue so it can be prevented from re-occurring.
Apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused and we will keep you updated on any further details we receive. Please let us know if you have any questions.
Which is just darned goofy. Basically, MSN/Hotmail throttled down how fast mail could come in, so Comcast started getting a big outbound queue. So Comcast just started blocking anything else going out to MSN/Hotmail without telling anyone.
Allow me to say that if our Messaging group did something like that, we’d be doing a lot of new hires for their positions pretty quickly.