MS are notorious for blacklisting IP ranges from providers like Linode, which makes it impossible for a small biz to run its own commercial system. I'm not surprised they also keyword block, because Outlook flags Microsoft's own marketing messages as spam. There really needs to be some kind of global Digital Bill of Rights which provides legal recourse from these giant sclerotic algo-run oligopolies. MS, Meta, Amazon…
This is about Microsoft, a corporation so giant and unaccountable that it's able to hide behind complexity. The OP's email issues may even be a non-malicious expression of that complexity. Nonetheless, the result is opaque power, from which European tech must rapidly divest dependency. But there is a larger pattern to acknowledge here. It's about unaccountable digital privilege and the ability to wield technology for…
That is the general idea and working theory, but in practice experience has taught me that the MDF doesn’t actually reliably perform this function. As always, it comes down to implementation.
I’ve handled the estates of multiple deceased members of my family, and in that capacity I have witnessed that the result of your death being reported to SSA varies wildly even across businesses in the same industry.
My favorite is ISPs. At least two of the major national ones don’t actually seem to close accounts upon death, even if notified, with no services active and the account settled to $0.
I still receive bills even after notifying the sender of the account holder’s death. There are still financial services accounts with no activity that seem never to close.
I assume that many businesses are just using open accounts they know belong to dead people in order to artificially inflate their customer counts.
The federal government and its agencies very quickly update their databases with additions to the death file, and that seems to stick. Private sector is a crap shoot.