Hotmail 'rejected your message to the following email addresses' or 'message rejected due to SPF policy' error persists despite fix

Hotmail users have lately been receiving a ‘rejected your message to the following email addresses’ error when trying to send emails.

In addition to this, some people keep getting a ‘message rejected due to SPF policy’ notification as well.

Despite its widespread popularity, Hotmail, like any other email service, is not immune to various bugs and issues.

For instance, we recently noted that some Outlook and Hotmail users were unable to send or receive emails due to a storage issue.

Also, we highlighted a problem where Hotmail or Outlook users could not sync their emails with the Gmail app.

And by looking at the reports (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) it appears that now a new one has surfaced. Multiple Hotmail users have been experiencing difficulties sending emails for the past few days.

This is because their messages are being wrongly flagged as spam due to a misconfiguration in the domain’s DNS SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record.

It appears that Microsoft had accidentally removed the ‘include:spf.protection.outlook.com’ record, which led to the problem.

People argue that they only receive ‘returned email warnings’ for a handful of messages that they send. Naturally, this makes it hard for them to figure out which emails have been sent and which have not.

Notably, the issue has been persistent for about a week and affects users across multiple platforms. Surprisingly, it persists even after the company claims to have fixed it on its end.

Without a doubt, this is bad news for those who utilize Hotmail for their day-to-day tasks or official work.

Every inbound email from Hotmail is being rejected due to SPF. It was working fine yesterday. It appears Microsoft has changed their SPF record which has excluded a large range of IP addresses that are used by Hotmail.
Source

An impacted user says that they repeatedly get an error message stating that the recipient’s email system can’t confirm that the message came from a trusted location.

All inbound hotmail emails to our org are being flagged, and checking the source IP MX toolbox reports it is not valid.
Source

Individuals have even tried disabling their VPN connection and switching to alternate networks, but to no avail. And they are now once again requesting Microsoft to fix this glitch as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has not officially responded to the matter. But we are hopeful that this concern will be addressed soon.

Rest assured, we’ll keep tabs on this topic and update this article with noteworthy information.

Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Microsoft Section, so be sure to follow them as well.

Featured image source: Outlook.

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