I have warned repeatedly of the downsides of giving the wrong people access to generative AI tools, but warnings be damned progress cannot be stopped. Progress will not be stopped especially when there is oodles of capitalistic dollars to be made regardless of the consequences and degradation of the quality of information. I have been as careful as possible when taking answers from AI powered tools (the real ones, not the ones that just have the label slapped on) and cross referencing my answers. It’s finally gotten to the point where I just avoid AI generated content as much as possible. It’s pretty much out of my control at this point. It’s just funny because I can still spot when trashy AI is involved as can others.
Well it’s one thing for me to choose to use AI tools, it’s another entirely for unqualified people to use them on my behalf. I had a particularly amusing interaction with someone who claims to be a “Microsoft Community Support Specialist”, when it’s clear they have no idea what they are doing. Microsoft already staffed a lot of really unqualified people to handle their support as is, now they have armed them with Bing/CoPilot and it’s obvious.
Outlook.com support
The above is my post to “support” to attempt to fix something that I cannot fix on my own. Believe you me, I won’t ask for help unless I absolutely cannot do it myself just so I can avoid exchanges like the one I just had.
Problem summary
It’s rather simple actually. I try to send email to someone with a bellsouth.net address and then 24 hours later I get a bounce back that says:
Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups: xxxxx xxxx (*** Email address is removed for privacy ***) Your message wasn't delivered. Despite repeated attempts to deliver your message, the recipient's email system refused to accept a connection from your email system...The message is a mile long, but that’s the bit that matters.
I first reached out to Oulook support… They were completely useless and they told me to go to Oulook.com support.
OKAY.
Went to outlook.com support and I get this AI generated nonsense answer from “Chris-S”:
Dear Eli Hayon1
Welcome to Microsoft Community.
According to your description of the problem, you are not able to send letters bellsouth.net using Outlook mailbox address.
For this issue, I would like to confirm if this problem only occurs when sending bellsouth.net (AT&T) mailboxes? Are you able to send properly to other recipients using your Outlook mailbox address?
Actually, the community staff can't directly view the user's account mailbox settings and modify them due to permissions, but based on the error you provided, if your mailbox sends mail to other inboxes (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) just fine, I'm tentatively suspecting that the bellsouth.net mailbox server may be using Outlook to send mail to your account. You can let the recipients who use bellsouth.net mailbox or if you have bellsouth.net mailbox, you can try to whitelist the mailbox in bellsouth.net environment, and then test whether it can be sent successfully.
At the same time, you can also try to rule out whether the problem is caused by Microsoft based on the content of the link:Fix NDR error 550 4.4.7 in Exchange Online - Exchange | Microsoft Learn
Finally, if you follow the link but still can't solve the problem, you can basically tell that bellsouth.net (AT&T) service provider on the server side of your Microsoft mailbox marked as spam, thus blocking all your emails sent to bellsouth.net, this problem, including you and the recipient himself, as well as Microsoft can not be acted upon, the only way is to let the recipient with the This is a problem that neither you, nor the recipient, nor Microsoft can do anything about. The only way to deal with this problem is for the recipient to contact the bellsouth.net (AT&T) service provider and explain that your Outlook mailbox is preventing you from sending to bellsouth.net, and the service provider will intervene to deal with this issue.
Feel free to text back if you need further help.
Best wishes
Chris.S-MSFT | Microsoft Community Support SpecialistThis word salad of nonsense wasn’t helpful at all and upon further inspection of what seemed to be suggestions, none of them helped.
At this point I feel like low effort nonsense like this deserves to be mocked and that’s exactly what I did because I am so tired of this crap (read my reply if you want). I pay for Office 365 and the fact that one day I just magically cannot send someone an email anymore is somehow my problem just boggles the mind. I am not the administrator, I cannot fix this problem for Microsoft! I am an end user! I would expect Microsoft to use one of their eleventy-billion employees to look into what the goddamn problem is and contact the owner of bellsouth.net (AT&T) and just fix the damn problem. Instead it’s this constant game of hot potato to avoid doing real work. Thanks for nothing.
Pathetic.
Microsoft – you basically already own the world in terms of operating system coverage. Can you seriously not just give me decent support for something I actually pay you for? It’s not asking for a lot.
Thumbnail generated ironically using CoPilot.