SNDS News

A number of people have mentioned over the last week or so that they’re seeing a lot of outages, failures and general ickiness with SNDS. I contacted Microsoft and asked about it. SNDS has been undergoing some upgrades and improvements and the outages were not intended to be end user visible. They’re going to keep a closer eye on things, while they finish the upgrades.
The good news in all of this is that SNDS is being upgraded and maintained. SNDS is still a functioning part of the Microsoft infrastructure, and this is good news for anyone who uses it as a data source.

New unsubscribe methods in the news
Return Path releases inbox benchmark study

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SNDS is back

For years now, Microsoft has maintained Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) for anyone sending mail to Hotmail/Outlook/Live.com. This is a great way for anyone responsible for an IP sending mail to hotmail to monitor what traffic Hotmail is seeing from that IP address.
This morning I got up to a number of people complaining that logins were failing on the website and the API was down. I contacted the person behind SNDS and they confirmed there was a problem and they were fixing it.
Sometime this afternoon it was possible to login to the SNDS interface again, so it looks like they did fix it.
A bit of a warning, though, don’t expect to see any of the data from the last few days. There seems to be something with SNDS that means that when the service is down data isn’t collected or available. In the past when there have been problems, older data was not populated when the service came back.

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Microsoft has a new TV ad showing how trivial it is to remove unwanted email from the inbox. Various busy people use the “sweep” and “delete” functions to clean up mail. The commercial even have a segment counting up the hundreds of emails deleted.
This tells me a few things.Images of all my different filters

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Outlook.com

The big news in email today is Microsoft’s announcement of the next version of Hotmail: Outlook.com. This does appear to be an attempt to compete with a host of Google’s offerings. Not only does Outlook.com include Skype and access to social media accounts, but it also includes web app versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 7GB of storage space.
I’m not sure how actively people will be grabbing Outlook.com addresses, as you can use hotmail.com addresses with the Outlook.com interface. Only time will tell, though, how this affects email marketing and spam filtering.

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