On April 2^nd, 2025 Microsoft announced new bulk sender requirements that apply to hotmail.com, live.com and outlook.com.

Basically these are similar to Google's bulk sender requirements by making mandatory SPF, DKIM, DMARC settings.

In addition senders must conform to some standard, basic good practices such as valid "From" and "Reply-to" addresses, functional opt-out links and low bounces and complaints rates.

You can read the complete announcement with all details here.

You can always test your newsletter by sending an email directly from the HTML or TEXT editing forms before creating a campaign.

With this test you can check your hyperlinks and whether some special smart links are correctly applied. 

Tip: add your own administrator email also as a subscriber.

A more complete way to test is the following:

1. Create the campaign.
2. Find your own email in the subscriber list.
3. Under "Actions" click the envelope icon .
4. In the pop-up window select the campaign you want to test and click "Send it".
5. Check your mailbox.
6. Check your summary report. It will be updated. The "Total sent" will show 1. Views, clicks and the email clients report will also be updated.
7. When you are satisfied with the result you can edit and schedule your campaign.