If your email service appears to be intermittent (and eventually stops altogether) then your activity on the server may have appeared to be suspicious (at least as far as the server is concerned!) and you may have been blocked from the server.
The most common cause for this is checking your email too regularly, this might sound a bit odd but you must remember you're account is in a shared environment and you may be sharing the email server with over a hundred other users so we limit the amount of connections to the mail server to ensure everyone gets fair access.
Most of our servers (unless you have your own server with us) are limited to 60 logins to an account from a particular IP address per hour, this is once per minute which we feel is often enough for anyone. If you login more than 60 times in an hour, our server will temporarily block you for the rest of that hour and the server will automatically email the account holder advising them to reduce their logins. If a temporary block happens more than 4 times the server will issue a full block which needs manually removing (you can do this yourself by reading this knowledgebase article - Blocked by the firewall).
Settings once per minute and still getting blocked?
This generally happens for one of two reasons:
- You have multiple devices (computers, mobile devices etc) coming from the same IP address logging into one email account.
- You have it set to once per minute and then regularly do a "send/receive" which logs in again.
