I talked to a web dev friend of mine and he says Microsoft's email service (outlook, hotmail etc) will outright block emails from certain email service providers they deem sketchy, and they're unfortunately more strict than they should be. It's likely the email service Ephinea uses to confirm...
Created a new Ephinea account, username: Lise, email: ian--c@live.com, but never received a verification email. When I use "Recover account name" I receive an email saying LISE is registered to this email, but I can't do anything else because the account was never verified.