Since Monday, July 22, the company has witnessed a 20 percent spike in the number of e-mails, bound for Hotmail accounts, that bounce back, company sources told ZDNet Australia.
A large number of Seek's customers use Hotmail accounts to carry out their job hunting activities discreetly, according to the company.
NineMSN spokesperson Samantha Herron insists that the Hotmail service is not malfunctioning. Hotmail technicians, she said, have tested Seek's Job Mail service and found that the notices are getting through to Hotmail accounts as intended.
In explanation of the apparent problem, Herron said that individuals that no longer need Seek's Job Mail service may be choosing to block it using Hotmail's filtering features.
NineMSN said e-mail filtering was the key topic of Hotmail's last e-mail newsletter. The newsletter was distributed on the Friday, July 19.
"Perhaps it shows that the filtering system is actually working," Herron said.
That explanation is unlikely to satisfy Seek on any level. Sources at the company have some concerns about the the new filters.
Seek's investigations to find an explanation for the problem found that email sent from its Web production server wasn't getting through to its dummy Hotmail accounts.
ZDNet Australia contacted several Web-based businesses known to depend on Web mail services for customer relations. None of those agencies witnessed an increase in bounce rates on messages sent to Hotmail accounts.
The responses come as no surprise to Seek. It said reporting such problems would contradict their commercial interests.
Seek said it has made contact with NineMSN and will discuss the matter with the company tomorrow.
