People e-mailing me and bouncing back

Question

People e-mailing me and bouncing back

Brooke Hicks 0

Hello,

I am experiencing ongoing issues receiving emails into my personal Outlook and Hotmail accounts from multiple unrelated businesses.

Senders are receiving bounce-back notifications, including SPF validation errors (550 5.7.23) and authentication errors.

This appears to be similar to the widespread issues being reported in the Microsoft Q&A discussions from 5–8 November 2026, where multiple Outlook and Hotmail users are reporting legitimate emails being rejected from unrelated sending domains.

Could you please investigate whether there is an issue with Microsoft's incoming email filtering or authentication systems affecting my accounts?

This is causing business communication to be missed, so I would appreciate urgent assistance.

Regards

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Answer 1

Hello

I am seeing a sudden increase in similar reports from other users in this forum as well.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any official information from Microsoft acknowledging this issue. Microsoft's published requirements for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC apply to senders sending more than 5,000 emails per day. However, based on the sudden increase in reports from the last few days, I suspect these requirements may now be affecting low-volume senders as well. This is just my observation, not something Microsoft has officially confirmed.

I helped several users with this issue the last few days in this forum. One interesting thing we noticed is that email headers may show DMARC as passing, even when the sending domain does not have a published DMARC record. We were able to identify this by checking the domain using a free tool such as https://mxtoolbox.com/.

In some cases, once the missing DMARC record was properly configured and verified, emails started coming through again.

For this reason, I strongly recommend having your senders check their SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for the affected sending domains. This is not an issue you can fix on your end. It has to be addressed on the sender's end.

If you need help checking these records, I am happy to do so. I would just need to know the sending domain name. You do not need to share the full email address.

Also, news article about this issue: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-outlook-spf-validation-error-blocks-email-sending-and-receiving/

Note: This is a non-Microsoft website. The page appears to be providing accurate, safe information. Watch out for ads on the site that may advertise products frequently classified as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Products). Thoroughly research any product advertised on the site before you decide to download and install it.