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.

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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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Still futile

As I mentioned last Thursday, both Yahoo and Microsoft filed oppositions to Holomaxx’s opposition to dismissal. Let me ‘splain… no, there is too much, let me sum up.
Holomaxx sued both Microsoft and Yahoo to force MS and Yahoo to stop blocking mail from Holomaxx.
The judge dismissed the initial complaint with leave to amend.
Holomaxx filed a first amended complaint.
Microsoft and Yahoo both argued that the first amendment complaint should be dismissed because it wasn’t fixed.
Holomaxx filed a motion in opposition to the motion to dismiss. Their arguments were reasonably simple.

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Robust protection under the CDA

Venkat also commented on the Holomaxx v. MS/Y! ruling.

As with blocking or filtering decisions targeted at malware or spyware, complaining that the ISP was improperly filtering bulk email (spam) is likely to fall on unsympathetic ears. It would take a lot for a court to allow a bulk emailer to conduct discovery on the filtering processes and metrics employed by an ISP. (Hence the rulings on a 12b motion, rather than on summary judgment.) Here the court reiterates the “good faith” standard for 230(c)(2) is measured subjectively, not objectively. That puts a heavy burden on plaintiffs to show subjective bad faith.

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