Newsletter suddenly classified as 'phishing' by Microsoft. Now what?

[Chelsea_Kiko]

same thing, here! Happened to our own email internally and for a large client. Update the thread if you guys hear anything else!

[Casey_Grimes]

Hey folks,

The core problem that seems to be causing this is mentioning "hotmail" in your email, causing Microsoft servers to incorrectly display this message. Now, for most folks this should be a non-issue day to day, but if you have anything in your email code itself for Hotmail-specific rendering, you could run into this problem. For example, a very common email CSS declaration for Hotmail rendering is

.ExternalClass{width:100%;} /* Force Hotmail to display emails at full width */

In this case, you'd just want to strip your CSS comment.

Edit: Initial testing shows that "this email was sent to so-and-so@hotmail.com" does not trigger this effect, but going to continue to monitor the situation.

[Chelsea_Kiko]

You got it, Courtney! Here is one of the emails that this happened to today....

[Will_Thomas]

I think you might be onto something there Courtney.  Your comment triggered the marketo thread update email to be identified as spam itself.

[Dan_Stevens_]

For us, Courtney's reply was quarantined by our servers without me even receiving it!  Thankfully I checked back here on the community to find the solution.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

versus

Would ya look at that.  Nice find Courtney Grimes​

[Steven_Vanderb3]

Looks like Microsoft fixed it, I can no longer replicate.

[Anonymous]

We've been having same problem and I just spotted that "very common" CSS declaration in the code. So another anecdotal vote in favor. Question is, what's the fix? The obvious answer is "remove the hotmail-specific code" - but there are downsides (ex. issues for hotmail users, though contingent on how many you have - not many for us as we're B2B). Not to mention that for my company at least we'd likely have to outsource having the template re-coded - seems simple but I've found deleting *anything* from the templates breaks them (possibly I'm doing it wrong - emphatically NOT a coder). And are we sure this is the cause...?

Thanks for the insights/validation, all.

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Eleanor,

In this case, you just literally need to remove the CSS comment (the part between /* and */). The actual part that does the fix (.externalClass {width: 100%}) can stay and will still do what it needs to for fixing Hotmail's issues.

EDIT: As a quick PSA, the full set of Hotmail fixes you should be using are:

.ReadMsgBody{width:100%;}

.ExternalClass { width:100%; }

.ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; }

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Courtney - very helpful guidance!