How does a university mail server stay on the good side of hotmail?

[Richard Loken <richardlo@admin.athabascau.ca>]

Good morning all,

I am having relationship issues with Hotmail.

My esteemed employer uses Moodle to manage distance delivery of an ever
increasing number of courses and each additional course means Moodle sends
increasing volumes of mail to remote students.  In addition, we have had
incidents with spammers hijacking our servers and spamming the universe
until we find them and shut them down.

This increasing volume of mail combined with fallout from spam attacks
has led to our being blacklisted by Hotmail and subsequently having our
traffic throttled so that there could be thousands of messages queued up
to Hotmail with delayed delivery.  A conversation with Hotmail led to them
providing a list of email described as spam by their users and the list
included mostly mail from legitimate academic email addresses - they were
reporting academic traffic rather than the spam that started this problem.
I don't entirely disagree with the hotmail users, some of the mail sent out
could be better described as unsolicited advertising than course related
communication.

What measures can we take here that will reduce our problems with big
email providers like (and especially like) Hotmail?

-- 
   Richard Loken VE6BSV, Unix System Administrator : "Anybody can be a father
   Athabasca University                            :  but you have to earn
   Athabasca, Alberta Canada                       :  the title of 'daddy'"
   ** richardlo@admin.athabascau.ca **             :  - Lynn Johnston