Hotmail Blocking No Tea Party

Microsoft is blacklisting email addresses from the United Kingdom, in yet another case of overzealous spam blocking. Microsoft is blocking many companies from emailing their customers that use Hotmail, even when they have expressly consented to receiving the emails.

According to e-consultancy, Microsoft charged the company $1700 to get whitelisted so that it could correspond with its customers. Microsoft isn't the first ISP to impede European emails. Verizon also has been blocking emails from e-consultancy and others on the continent, which I discovered last year, and resulted in a lawsuit.

The practice of squeezing commercial organizations to pay higher fees to send emails is just getting started as Yahoo and AOL are very interested in charging companies for the privilege of emailing their customers. Obviously charging companies for the amount of emails that they send hasn't been a deterrent for spammers, but there needs to be a more technical solution than broad embargos that group legitimate enterprises with spammers.