A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
Friendly reminder to not use freemail accounts (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc) for anything important. It’s very hard to get any sort of support as your account is seen as low-priority. Also, always use your own domain so that it’s easy to move to a different provider in the future, without having to change your email address.
FastMail and MXRoute are good options. MXRoute has good Black Friday sales and all their plans include unlimited email address and domains (you’re just limited by total disk space).
Microsoft’s paid plan is decent too. $70/year for a personal account or $100/year for a family account (up to 6 people) and it includes the Office suite, 1TB cloud storage, and email.
Why would I give Microsoft money if they’re behaving like this?
That’s a reasonable question.
A lot of people are already paying Microsoft, either for OneDrive space or for Office. In that case, you may as well use what you’re already paying for. They’re also much more likely to provide support if you’re a paying customer.
I wasn’t saying to give Microsoft money, I was just saying that their paid plans are good value, particularly in the case where you need Office.
In this article Microsoft is locking out paid customers. Which does make a good case for them.
Ah, I didn’t realise it affected paid custokers Thanks for the info.
Having used the web version of Office at my job, I know I would not pay for it. It is compatible-ish, but severely lacking in features, enough so that I don’t trust it to render properly or maintain the formatting entered using the desktop app. If that is good enough then there are lots of alternatives.
The plan I mentioned includes the desktop apps, not just the web apps.
The web version of Excel is way better than Google Sheets IMO.
Or if you have a little more money, there’s the Proton pass which comes with VPN, Email, Drive, Calendar, and Password Manager. All protected under swiss privacy laws. They have a free tier of their drive with 5GB storage so you can collaborate on other people’s documents without needing to pay yourself, and they have a $120/yr US Tier for 500GB for 1 person, and a $288/year US Tier for 3TB for up to 6 people. If you don’t need that much storage and don’t care about anything other than the email, they have a 15GB plan with just email and calendar for only $48/yr US.
This is not an ad, I am a real person with no connection to Proton except a deep respect for their business, and an even deeper hatred for Microsoft
I think Proton is a good choice. I’ve heard good things about them.
For me personally, I’d be worried about putting all my eggs in one basket. For example, I like having my password manager (Bitwarden) entirely separate from everything else. I know that’s not how the general population thinks though, so I think all-in-one solutions like Proton (and also Microsoft’s and Google’s paid suites) definitely have their place.
Do Proton have a larger plan with just email and calendar?
https://proton.me/mail/pricing
Well they have been behaving just as Microsoft has been doing if we’re complaining about these kinds of behaviours. Handing over information about environmentalists and freedom fighters to repressive governments, etc.
I think I’d rather have proton be my password manager than anyone else out there, and then take advantage of the other services they offer with it. Unless I wanted to keep my password manager entirely offline, which is far more secure but far less convenient
If you use a keepass file, you can just have it on a trustworthy cloud (like private nextcloud server) and sync to the keepass apps via webDav. Works perfekt!
Some sites and services won’t accept accounts with e-mails outside of the mainstream ones though.
Do you have an example? That’d block pretty much every business customer, including paid Google and Microsoft users (as the paid accounts use a custom domain). I’m not sure which sites and services would want to block all business users like that.
Also, FastMail is definitely mainstream. It’s pretty popular and has been around for 25 years.
It’s at least common on forums as bots love making accounts with non-megacorp email addresses on PhpBB and MyBB forums. Typically, there aren’t people signing up the same services with business emails as personal ones, so if ones expecting not to be used by businesses want to fight spam, it’s generally pretty effective and consequence-free to block email providers not known to have effective anti-bot measures built in.
There were 2 online game stores that wouldn’t allow me to register with a protonmail account, AllYouPlay and another one that I can’t recall, which was weird to me
i’m using my own domain for mails for 15 years now and never had any problems. and i sign up on a bunch of sites
same. I see outrage-obsessed people constantly talk about how using a custom domain or (gasp) running your own mail server is internet suicide and literally impossible because your addresses won’t be seen as real or your mail will never get delivered by anyone. I’ve been doing both for over a decade with no trouble whatsoever, so I wonder how badly these folks are botching their mail setup to be getting that treatment.
I run my own email server, but I use an outbound SMTP relay so that my email get delivered. It’s very very difficult to get emails from ‘new’ self-hosted mail servers into the inbox of Outlook/Hotmail users, unless you own the whole /24 IPv4 range used to send the emails, and can guarantee it won’t become anywhere close to spammy.
Since you’ve been hosting yours for a while, Microsoft might have it marked as ‘trusted’. It takes a while to get to that point though - you need to send them quite a few emails, and users need to not mark them as spam.
This is largely an issue with top level domains. Things outside of .com/.org/.net tend to get flagged as non-viable email addresses, because it doesn’t fit the specific “*@*.com” format that the site has programmed their scripts to look for.
Also, spammers and scammers often tend to use TLDs outside of the big three, because the domains tend to be cheaper when they don’t end with “.com”. So the spammer is able to buy and cycle through their domains much faster, because they’re saving money with every single domain registration.
Nah not for the big providers. The biggest problem is not having RUA for DMARC set up at all, set to None for the action or having an email in the RUA that will give a bounce message back to a sender (or not having DMARC at all in your DNS). The safe thing to do is set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC (correctly).
You cant always control getting into a spam box from time to time if someone in your IPs /24 makes it onto popular spam databases but that’s very temporary but it is also very possible someone in your /24 is always on the lists. You can check yourself and there are both scripts and sites that will check most of the popular ones for you.
/24 is a very popular CIDR to use for stuff like spam filtering or internet facing IPS.
I use
d@d.sband usually don’t have issues 😛did a quick check with a weird domain name to not hit reserved ones etc,.
on one domain hoster .com was the second cheapest, only one other offered was cheaper all others offered were more expensive than .com looking at name.com it showed some bit cheaper ones like .pro or .life but majority seems definitively more expensive than .com also most spam i got (as long as i got spam) was genuinely (spf) from .com domains that days. however i do not really get much spam any more 😁
Doubt. Which sites?
AllYouPlay and another online game store wouldn’t let me register with a protonmail address
Apologies for doubt. That’s absolutely bizarre.
really i’ve had that problem once (and only once in > 20years of self-hosted emailling), and guess what? competitors are available, problem quickly solved.
Fastmail is the shit. I feel it’s really underrated. Everyone on Lemmy just knows about Proton.
MXRoute looks awesome! I just switch one domain to them to try.They have a lifetime plan right now that looks nice.
I was eager to replace the email bundled with my registrar. Speaking of, could you recommend a registrar that has a similar experience to these?
I have most of my domains at Porkbun.