I have jumped through some hoops and delivery to Hotmail addresses appears to be working again. Basically it came down to telling Hotmail to check and verify that email that says it is from copi.org is in fact from copi.org. As to why they wouldn't check first and then reject mail instead of just silently dropping email is beyond me. Well, one shouldn't expect a multibillion dollar monopoly to be able to reliably run critical services such as email.

An unplanned, extended outage occured on Tuesday, 28 Aug. It turns out the power supply in the machine died. Fortunately since I no longer am using my own hardware I didn't have to debug the issue, find new working hardware, and install it. Unfortunately since I no longer am using my own hardware I couldn't debug the issue, .... The machine was down for approximately 12 hours starting at 2:00 PM. This was a basic hardware failure and didn't affect any data stored on the machine.

It has recently come to my attention that hotmail is a horribly broken email service. Legitimate emails sent to hotmail accounts can be silently dropped, that is without the sender or receiver knowing there is a problem. This issue appears to have started around March. It is briefly discussed at the end of a Wikipedia article. A more technical discussion goes over what one person did to understand this problem and try to get it corrected without success. The description of his email environment closely mimics what is set up for Copi.org. All the reliable free email services he lists happily receive email from Copi.org. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this. Until hotmail fixes their practices I cannot guarantee that email sent to a hotmail account will get delivered.

Copi.org has been moved to a dedicated hosting service at M5 hosting. This provides a faster connection and should lead to greater reliability.