Update

The issues reported below appear to have been transient and mostly resolved. If you believe you are still having issues, please submit a ticket at https://support.purelymail.com/. We have re-opened signups for new users.

Impact

Users have reported the following two issues over the last week:

Slow connections to IMAP where messages may be delayed for a short period.
Users are also intermittently not able to send emails to Gmail users (both manual and forwarded mail). Users will receive error messages from Gmail’s Postmaster email address in this case. We have also seen reports for the spectrum.net service, with similar errors being reported.

What you are likely to see if you are affected.

IMAP Latency

IMAP latency may cause messages to be delayed longer than normal.

Gmail Deliverability

If you are affected with issues sending to Gmail, you will receive an error from their postmaster similar to the following:

DOMAIN.COM (Rerouted) at remote mailserver gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
(142.250.31.27): SMTPSendFailedException: 421-4.7.28 Gmail has detected an
unusual rate of mail originating from your SPF
421-4.7.28 domain [DOMAIN.COM]. To protect our users from
421-4.7.28 spam, mail sent from your domain has been temporarily rate limited.
421-4.7.28 For more information, go to
421-4.7.28  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to
421 4.7.28 review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. MESSAGE_ID - gsmtp
 (421)

This email details that Gmail has restricted our sending IP’s from sending to Gmail, as they have determined that we are sending too much (therefore breaking their external rate limits).

We have seen similar for Spectrum.net. The corresponding error message will look like the following:

We could not deliver the attached mail for the following recipients.  
EMAIL at remote mailserver REMOTE_MAILSERVER.  
(IP): SMTPSenderFailedException: 550 5.1.0 <EMAIL>  
sender rejected. Please see  
https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/understanding-email-error-codes
for more information. AUP#In-1310  
(550)

Team notes

We are aware that this is affecting many of our users. We have been receiving intermittent reports of issues between late Oct 2025 - Nov 5th 2025. We will be looking into solutions that can be implemented our side to help resolve the issue.

In the meantime, we have temporarily disabled new signups so that we don’t create additional issues from new user growth.

If you own the receiving Gmail account, you can add the sending email (in Purelymail) to your account in Gmail and then use POP3 to download the mail (rather than forwarding it). The settings to do this can be found in Gmail under Settings (Gear at top right) -> See All Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Check Email from other accounts. A guide on how to complete this can be found here: How to set up email receiving for a user’s inbox in Gmail - Purelymail Support Helpdesk

If you are trying to send to a Gmail or Spectrum.net user, and receiving this error, then please wait for a small bit before trying again. This should give time for the rate limit to decrease a small amount, hopefully letting your email send through.