Hotmail accounts do not receive New order emails

For issues like this, we also always recommend using a service like Mandrill. It’s a real pain to get yourself off the blacklist and it’s only a matter of time before you are put back on that same blacklist when you resume sending again.

There is not really anything we can do to prevent this. It’s the state email and websites are at right now and Microsoft/Hotmail is ‘defending’ her users this way, unfortunately.

For a business website, especially eCommerce or other high email demanding services, I always recommend choosing an external email sending service due to prevent this kind of issues and also the really useful statistics you can get out of it.

I’ve been in touch with Mandrill re. Hotmail delivery problems and received this excellent, comprehensive reply:
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MandrillApp writes:

Beyond that, we noticed a few things about these emails which might be contributing to the emails getting either delayed or possibly filtered more aggressively by Hotmail:

They come from a noreply address, which means that if a recipient were to try to reply or get in touch, the address makes it seem like they can’t contact the sender. This can be problematic, and it’s something we generally discourage. Here’s a blog post that we wrote last year about this: http://blog.mandrill.com/declaring-war-on-no-reply-addresses.html

There’s no logo or identifying information about the sender in the body of the email – no contact website, no contact address – in general including that information or some branding helps ensure that when recipients get the messages, they have an indication in the body of the email of who is sending the email, how to contact them, what the website is, and more.

The test email sent also has a relatively small amount of content, which means there isn’t much for spam filters to analyze. Including contact information, including a link to the website not only provides more information for a spam filter, but also provides some consistent information that a spam filter can analyze for messages being sent.

SPF and DKIM records haven’t been added for this sending domain. While not strictly required, we do strongly recommend adding both so that Mandrill can authenticate the messages as your sending domain, which in turn can help improve deliverability.

It looks like you’ve got link-tracking turned on, and are using a custom tracking domain, click.xxxxxxxx.com. If the same click-tracking domain is being used by a variety of clients or senders, it’s possible that the domain, in combination with other factors, is triggering a more aggressive filtering by the receiving server. This domain also at least appears unrelated to the sending domain, xxxxxxxxx.com, which may cause some confusion by recipients.

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Implementing a couple of these seems to have solved the problem – hotmails draconian filtering is the issue – the answer seems to be “send a better email”.