I Am Spam, Spam I Am

I do not heart Hotmail. Or any of the Windows Live Brand.

I don’t send spam. I don’t forward jokes to hotmail addresses.

I don’t know why they hate me.

I think it all started in March… (Cue misty clouds and harp music…)

It was time for the basketball tournament. Which, for a certain group of my family, meant e-mail trash-talk time. Four cousins, two spouses and a boyfriend, an aunt, an uncle, and said uncle’s brother and two sons. (Usually another cousin, but he was barred from the bet this year.) We make our picks, but that’s the least of the experience.

Knowing this event takes up a lot of mailbox space, I planned ahead. I had a hotmail account sitting unused for the past 2 years. It didn’t get any spam, so it was going to be perfect for this. I set it up on my cell phone, so I could access it anytime. Perfect. I’d get an alert every time I got a new message. (Man, did that get old fast.)

Of the 13 of us playing this year, there were a few who didn’t participate in the written debate. (About 5) Of the remaining 8, there was a firestorm of mail. About 2 weeks into the tourney, I deleted 800 e-mails one day. They still came flooding in.

Then, all of a sudden, my messages wouldn’t go out. Hotmail said I’d reached my maximum for a 24-hour period. Um, what? Ok, so I used other addresses. (I could work around this.) The next day, it tells me I have to verify I’m a person and not a spambot by clicking on this link and typing in this code. Which I did. But the maximum was still in effect.

Two things irritated me about this. 1. I wasn’t composing new messages. I was clicking ‘reply to all’. If they would just verify the headers…2. I didn’t set up a new account and send out that many e-mails. I jumped through their hoops and still, nothing.

Back to last week.

I sent an e-mail to my family, telling them about the birthday festivities. All the hotmail messages bounced. I figured it was just Hotmail acting weird. After all, I wasn’t getting any new messages to mine.

My dad never got his e-mail. He didn’t know about my plans until during the time to be there, so it was too late.

Yesterday and today, I get bounced back messages from my cousin, who I send about 1-3 messages every day. Have been for months. So I look into the message, because I’ve been getting stuff in my hotmail the past couple of days.

Now hotmail thinks my work address is spam.

I talked to our IT person. (Who doesn’t know IT.) I minimized the Question of the Day aspect and played up the “some of our customers use hotmail” aspect.

Turns out, somebody used our domain name to send real spam. And that’s our problem???

Lucky for me, I have at least a half-dozen e-mail addresses. Too bad the convenient ones are unusable.