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Your mail client stopped connecting, but webmail still works. This happens when repeated failed logins from your address trip the server’s brute-force protection and your IP address is blocked. This article covers the email-specific side of it. For the full picture, including how to confirm a block and get it released, see My IP address has been blocked.
You can still get your mail. A block stops your mail client, not the mailbox. Everything is still there and still arriving, and you can read and send through webmail while you sort this out.

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Why mail clients cause this

Mail clients are unusually good at triggering a block, because they retry on a timer without asking. A single device holding a password you have since changed will keep failing every few minutes, all day, until something stops it. Every device the mailbox has ever been set up on is a candidate. In practice it is almost always one of these:
  • An old phone or tablet in a drawer, still configured and still on Wi-Fi
  • A colleague on leave, whose laptop is retrying from inside a bag
  • A machine where you changed the password on your main device but never updated the others
  • A shared mailbox set up on more devices than anyone can now remember
For the exact thresholds, see the thresholds on the main article. The short version: a device retrying every five minutes reaches them the same morning.

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What to do

  1. Work out which mailbox is causing it. If you are not sure, open a ticket at https://my.hosting.com and ask. Support can identify the mailbox from the server logs.
  2. Sign that mailbox out on every device you can reach. This is the step that matters. If a device is still retrying, the block comes straight back after it is lifted.
  3. Reset the mailbox password, then update it everywhere at once.
  4. Ask support to release the block. What to include in the ticket is listed under what to do on the main article.
If your mail client is failing but nothing else is, and webmail also fails, this is probably not a block. Work through Troubleshooting e-mail accounts instead.