General status
All mail.coop systems have now been running continuously since 3 May apart from occasional restarts for maintenance.
Email deliverability to Outlook and Hotmail
A number of users have received warning emails after sending to Hotmail and Outlook users. These typically say:
This is the mail system at host mail.mail.coop.
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THIS IS A WARNING ONLY. YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.
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Your message could not be delivered for more than 4 hour(s).
It will be retried until it is 5 day(s) old.
Our technical team has been investigating the background to this. They comment:
Analysis of messages is machine learning driven at Hotmail/Outlook (with 100 millions of users it is not possible for these to managed otherwise). A new IP sending email will have a poor reputation by default. This applies to a new service like mail.coop and will improve over time.
We have raised a query with Outlook. They state:
Nothing was detected to prevent your mail from reaching Outlook.com customers.
Thus overall we expect these problems to go away. We will continue to monitor the situation.
Rate limit and Spam reputation services
We are actively monitoring for blocks by spam reputation services. On a check of 77 such services, we passed all.
There was a temporary listing on Abusix on Saturday 18 May which we removed.
Such listings happen from time to time. However our technical team is implementing a new rate limit on outgoing emails to minimise the impact when user accounts become compromised, as happened to one Phone Coop user recently.
Please contact us if you think that rate limit will cause you problems.