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I've been using my Hotmail account for 15+ years and now I can't send emails from it anymore (either from the web browser or from Outlook). I can login just fine, and I've reset my password and it still doesn't work.

To clarify, the message appears to send correctly, but there's no sign of it at the recipient's account. It's not in their junk mail folder either. There's no indication that the message was not delivered, or that something went wrong. It just never gets to its destination. I've tried sending emails to several of my friends, and none of them get my emails anymore, starting yesterday...

I'm guessing Microsoft has wrongly identified my Hotmail address as a spammer, so my messages now appear to be sent, but don't get delivered...

It's probably no coincidence, but I was experimenting with sending an HTML email, for a marketing campaign my company is planning next week. I probably made a few mistakes, such as using all-caps titles (for stylistic reasons), not yet including an unsubscribe link (I was just sending the messages to myself for testing, while I figured out the weird HTML/CSS rules of email marketing), and perhaps not including a text email alongside the HTML email.

I've checked the following two links to see if my IP address was black-listed, and it was not:

  1. https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
  2. https://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/

Is there anything I can do to recover my account? I don't want to switch email addresses and notify all my contacts, and change all my hundreds of account logins that use that email address...

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    The email might have been blacklisted "outside" of MS as well. Did you try sending an email to yourself to a different hotmail account? What about incoming emails for other accounts/domains? Is the email being saved in your sent folder? Definitely use the webmail page for further troubleshooting. Also, write a message to Hotmail support, they can check the server logs. Additionally, you might check with the support of one of the receiver accounts to see if the email reached the destination server but not the mailbox.
    – Albin
    Commented Oct 4, 2020 at 18:20

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This was the problem. It wasn't me; it was them. Microsoft said the following here: https://portal.office.com/servicestatus

Update: Since then, all the test emails I had sent to myself, which weren't delivered, have been delivered, so it seems like Hotmail/Outlook is working again.

Title: Emails aren't delivered to recipients

User Impact: Users can send email but the messages aren't being delivered to the recipient.

Current status: We've developed and successfully tested a fix that will address the issue. We're now in the process of applying the fix to restore email delivery.

Start time: Saturday, October 3, 2020, at 7:00 PM UTC

Next update by: Sunday, October 4, 2020, at 10:00 PM UTC

enter image description here

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