To All those who have listed corporations and show less than 20 pilots, the listed methods of contact ( the message evelope, the contact block in the Corporation drop down and team chat will not process. They just respond with a message saying the recipent does not have a level allowing access. So I can only assume that all those Corporations listing one, two and up to 19 pilots are outdated or no longer active. I also assure that the developers have never purged this list. I have tried all three methods to contact several of these very small Corporations (less that 5 and up to 15 pilots) with the same results.
the reason this happens is they introduced a clearance level system and you are automatically assigned a clearance level according to what your account has when you log in for the first time after the update, if those corp CEOs haven’t logged in since the update, they are clearance 0, and haven’t unlocked the trade system. What does trade have to do with it? Well, they couldn’t make trade a separate system so they integrated it into the mail system, in order to prevent illegitimate trades you have to have an account with some play time, IE Clearance level like 2+ or something idk