Thoughts 08 Aug 2008 07:40 am
Hotmail Filters are Broken
Microsoft is blocking the word Tibet from their Hotmail addresses.
An Australian author of a book on Tibet with the title of Our Tibet received the error msg:
An M$ spokesperson had a different explanation:
The company blocks usernames that include the names of various financial institutions. This is meant to make life harder for those seeking to impersonate a bank using an official-looking e-mail address in order to steal customers’ passwords. In this case Microsoft is blocking usernames containing “tib,” apparently to protect customers of TIB Bank in Florida.
I checked and now the error msg has been changed to say that the name -any name containing the three letter combination of “tib”- is unavailable.
–OK guys. This is already all over the net, so isn’t it a little late to try and fool people?
Microsoft’s list of financial institutions is not very comprehensive or foolproof — “etrade” and “wells-fargo” both work.
About 10 or 15 years ago I tried to help a company set up their first website. Their domain name contained the word jewelry. The software at the isp wouldn’t let them use their domain name as their site name because it contained the letters “jew.”
This is expected from a small company running low cost software, but M$ with their effectively unlimited budget could at least write a more effective set of filters.
…..Nah, that would require that they think things through instead of taking the simplest least efficient approach.
I maintain a domain that is blacklisted by the Hotmail servers. –Almost 5 years ago our email server was hijacked and used to send spam. The problem has long since been dealt with and we don’t show up on anybody else’s blacklist but I have given up on trying to get M$ to remove us from their system. Evidently that would mean that a real live person would have make a decision and I doubt that their automatic software will allow that.
–Dave? Dave? ♫ Daisy, Daisy….♪
This sort of stupidity is what happens when you rely exclusively on an automated a system with no simple way to deal with exceptions.
All they have to do is set it up so a person can submit a name to a live person for an exception.
–Never mind. That means they would have to provide “customer service” instead of mindless automation.