For users who have a reseller enabled account you will receive daily notifications about the status of your IPs reputation to Hotmail if we detect that there is a problem.  This problem can be anything from being partially filtered by Hotmail to being completely blocked.  In the email alert we send you the data that Hotmail has made available to us for the last 24 hours.  The data represents factual information about what actually transpired, it's effectively built from the log files of the inbound mail machines and other servers at Hotmail and Microsoft.

The email will look similar to this image below.

IP

This is your dedicated IP which is having the problem.

Usernames

These are the usernames which are associated with that IP.

UserIDs

These is the ID that corresponds to each username.

Status
Displayed here are the aggregate results of the spam filtering applied to all messages sent by the IP during the given activity period.  No spam filter is perfect and, in particular, this information is meant to be only one data point that helps paint a picture, not be a final judgment that the traffic was truly spam or not.  The following table defines the colors in terms of the percent of time that a "spam" verdict is rendered on a message.  Please note that one message to ten recipients counts as ten spam/not spam verdicts, not one.

The percentage range for the yellow designation may seem large but is actually fairly small in terms of the number of IPs that fall into this range relative to the other two.  Unfortunately, since SNDS is available to anyone who can prove they own an IP range, this is a case where we must be careful not to provide too much data that might assist spammers.  One trick however, when viewing data for a number of IPs, is that it can often be enlightening to consider the non-yellow IPs: if they're green, the yellow results are most likely very close to the 10% end.  Similarly, if the majority of the other IPs are red, the yellows probably represent results near 90%.  The same technique can be applied when looking at one IP's history.

Please keep in mind that this result doesn't directly represent deliveries to users' inboxes or "Junk e-mail" folders.  Settings controlled by each user might rescue some legitimate traffic from being put in the "Junk e-mail" folder, or conversely, might treat other messages more harshly.  It doesn't take into account messages that might have been caught but weren't because they were on a user's safelist, for example.

Trap hits
Displays the number of messages sent to "trap accounts".  Trap accounts are accounts maintained by Windows Live Hotmail that don't solicit any mail.  Thus any messages sent to trap accounts are very likely to be spam.  Well-behaved senders will hit very few such accounts because they're generally sending to people who give them their address and because they collect and process their NDRs.  Spammers have a much harder time avoiding them because, in general, they can't and don't do either of those good practices.

RCPT
This is the number of RCPT commands sent by the IP during the time period in question.  RCPT commands are part of the SMTP protocol used to send mail, specifically that which specifies one's intent to send mail to the provided recipient.  That is, the command "RCPT TO:<example@hotmail.com>" requests Windows Live Hotmail's servers to respond with whether it will accept mail for example@hotmail.com, information which is invaluable to spammers trying to compile recipient lists for future spamming.  For reference, more than a third of IPs sending mail to Windows Live Hotmail keep the fraction of RCPT commands that don't result in message recipients under 10% and that is a good benchmark to measure against.

Blocked

IPs which are blocked from sending mail into Hotmail.  Attempts to send mail to Hotmail's mail servers from these IPs will result in consistent refusal, however use of the Hotmail web user interface may not be affected--it is controlled separately.  The reason or source of the block is provided, along with more specific information about it.  To see about unblocking an IP address, please go to the main Postmaster site and follow the instructions there.

Block reason

The reason why the IP was blocked by Hotmail.

More information can be found here.