20190425_Elephant at the Metal Zoo flickr photo by Damien Walmsley shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
A couple of weeks ago I had a feeling that my emails weren’t working properly. I couldn’t work out what was happening, but sometimes I sent an email and got no response at all. But I didn’t think much about it until I sent an email a couple of times about something time critical to somebody I knew was awaiting my email, and followed it up with a Teams message when there was no response.
Anyway, after this I put a request over the help desk with a couple of dates and times of emails I thought were not getting through and asked them to look into it. Later that day, as I was out and about, I got a Teams message from a guy who identified himself as “Threat and Vulnerability Lead” at UofG who told me what was happening.
Back in late 2023 I changed my Outlook signature to include a link to my Mastodon profile. I still had a link to my Twitter/X in the same signature, you might like to note. And, on Feb 27th 2025 Microsoft decided that this Mastodon link was “malicious”. Yes, that’s right – nearly 18 months after I added it to my signature.
I removed the link – as the IT guy said, it wasn’t something UofG were doing or within their control. But it annoys the hell out of me that MS are flagging up a link to Mastodon as malicious while ignoring my Twitter/X link. (I removed that as well, by the way).
Go figure!
One more way MS makes there stuff less useful. I wonder if you found out if they were blocking social.ds106.us specifically? Or, is it wider like a list of Masto instances, or could they even be blocking all fedi instances?
The message I got suggested that it was all Masto instances that were being blocked.
Sadly email filtering like this is making it impossible for anyone to attempt to slef-host their own email server. All the big email cloud exchanges will arbitrarily blacklist a one-off, bespoke email domain they don’t recognize. Then, it’s up to the individual to jump every hoop impediment thrown in their way by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whomever is running the Email exchange. Somebody I bumped into on Mastodon was complaining one day, things have changed
Yup, that’s what my IT guy was saying. It’s shite.
Hard to believe that Twitter/X was an allowed link (given the racist and fascist posts on that piece of crap platform) but not Mastodon (given the creative connections flowing there). I wonder if Bluesky would be filtered?
Kevin
I know. I didn’t check, but I expect Bluesky would be allowed.