TIPS & MYTHS
Why you shouldn’t use them for your job search.
SUMMARY:
Do you tell prospective employers to contact you at an Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN.com, or Live.com e‑mail address? If you do, there’s a small but real chance that Microsoft will block e‑mails from a given employer—including e-mails they send in response to yours. You’ll never know they answered your e-mail. The employer may never know that you didn’t receive their e‑mail. Even if they find out, they’re not likely to make any further effort to contact you.
Don’t take my word for it:
Do a Web search for the following phrase:
Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN.com, Live.com reject e-mails
Or try the following phrase (include the quotation marks):
“Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics”
(This wording is from Microsoft’s standard bounceback message.) You’ll see many postings by IT people discussing this problem.
There’s a 2025 thread on this issue at webhostingtalk.com, an interesting industry forum frequented by independent web hosting providers. They also had a thread on this back in 2014.
In 2007, Dan Goodin, an internationally-recognized IT security expert, wrote an article about this in The Register: “Hotmail’s antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too.”
Back in 2003, CNET reported on exactly the same problem: “MSN blocks e-mail from rival ISPs.”
CHOOSING AN ISP FOR YOUR WORK-SEARCH EMAILS—AND YOUR WEBSITE (useful info, and perhaps hard to find): As I said, Google Gmail is the simplest solution to this. But if you’re looking for an ISP (or hosting service) to host your website or for private e-mail service, do your homework and make sure it’s a reputable one. ISPs that host a lot of spam-generators are likely to be blacklisted, so that e-mails sent through them are blocked—and not just by Microsoft. And cheap or free e-mail hosts (see below, on EIG/Newfold) might make their real money by spamming you, pushing ads at you, selling the information you provide, and wasting your time with efforts to hook you onto signing up for features that cost money. In the hosting market, the better-known names are not always the best.
Crystal Résumés has used MDD Hosting for web hosting and e-mail since 2016, and we recommend them highly. (Very, very highly—for ease of use, value, and extraordinary customer support.) They seem to be one of the best-known and best-regarded independent hosting services.
A tip for weeding out the usual suspects: For a long time, a surprisingly large number of hosting firms—big, medium-sized, and medium-small, including many well-known names—were owned by a company called Endurance International Group (EIG). EIG did not have a good reputation, and the quality of service at the firms they acquired was said to fall off badly post-acquisition. EIG merged with Web.com in 2021 to form Newfold Digital, one of the world’s largest web-hosting providers. Newfold seems to have the same reputation that EIG had. (See, for example, thishosting.rocks, List of All EIG (Newfold Digital) Hosting Providers and Why You Should Avoid Them, which I checked in March of 2024.)