'www.oceanfree.net' has been on life-support for many years, allowing only the receiving of emails, and no possibility of creating new email accounts. It had in fact at one time given its users a date by which it would scrap the service entirely. Never happened for some reason.
About a week ago, I realised that all emails from Oceanfree had ceased, and figured that they had finally decided the put this mut out of its misery. Nope! Some kind of 'reset' was after been done though, because when I signed in online - doing so from a email client no longer had any effect - I discovered that I could once again receive emails. Thinking something might be afoot, I also tried sending emails from my oceanfree account and was elated to find that this also worked - first time in at least 8 years! Unfortunately, while receiving emails using an email-client is once again possible, it refuses to allow the sending of emails from anything other than web-browsers.
Getting excited about an pop3 email server is kinda sad I admit, but this was my first email address and the only one that I have used consistently over the years, Microsoft's excepted. Since it was mainly used as a junk-email dump, it would have been no great loss either, but then, there's the Nostalgia Factor to consider. :)
The company behind oceanfree, British Telecom, seems to be out to take another stab at the Irish broadband market as it is adding an advert - "from €20 broadband" - to all emails going through its servers. Seeing as I'm paying twice that to Three, another British-based company, I thought it worth checking out, but couldn't find any info on what you would get for that money. Just looking to generate traffic it seems.
Edit:
Despite the above rhetoric (nearly 2 years ago), an indication of how little time I have for this Oceanfree email account is that I've only just discovered that my account's password has been hacked - a couple of months ago, in fact! - and some clown is attempting to extort money, both by threatening to release 'saucy' details contained therein to my family/associates etc. or else triggering an embedded virus to wreak havoc on my system. Good luck with that. This actually gave me a giggle, given that, a) I'm Linux-based, and b) it's been virtually unused for nearly two decades and contains nothing but junk mail! The only reason they managed to hack this account is that it is not on a secure https server - also something I've only just realised...
Which renders all of the above, null & void! If BT were looking to resurrect the Oceanfree email service, the very first thing they would have done was stick it on a secure server - which they didn't, obviously 'cos the notion existed only in my head! Confirmation of this was found when I went to change the email account's login password - I got a 404 'Page not found' error!!!
All of this doesn't explain why sending emails suddenly started working again. Not that any of this matters now, given what has happened.
Final edit:
A couple of months on, and someone has finally drove a stake through this dog's heart - the 'www.oceanfree.net' mail server is no more, with the link now redirecting to a paid-for web-services site. The end of an era, if only in my own head, it being my first email address and all. It will at least put paid to one wannabe extortionist. They'd been spamming this account for over two years with this nonsense, varying the amount demanded by a few hundred dollars, but always with the proviso that this would be their final demand - pay now or suffer the consequences! It would be funny but for the fact that there must be a sizeable percentage of people that fall for this stuff & pay-up.
Oceanfree - RIP.
