'Microsoft killed my online life,' Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza
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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.

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

  • @PM_Your_Nudes_PleaseEnglish
    4•27 days ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•26 days ago

      because the domains tend to be cheaper when they don’t end with “.com”.

      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 😁

    • @Avatar_of_SelfEnglish
      1•26 days ago

      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.