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Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza (www.windowscentral.com)

submitted 4 months ago by Linkerbaan@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] dan@upvote.au 58 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (30 children)

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.

[–] LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 months ago (14 children)

Some sites and services won't accept accounts with e-mails outside of the mainstream ones though.

[–] ben_dover@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] experbia@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

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