The Bishopthorpe.net email service is once again out of action, and as before it’s due to an insecure email account being accessed and used to generate spam emails. Under these circumstances the web hosting company disable the entire outgoing email service to prevent any further spam attacks compromising the system. We’ll try to restore the service as soon as possible, but please do ensure you keep your email account passwords secure and not easily guessable.
This is becoming a regular problem with the bish.net email service, and it again raises the question of whether it’s sensible to keep providing this free service. As users are probably aware, Bish.net email is a free service and was originally set up when few people had access to email services of any kind. In the years since then many alternatives have been made available and people have tended to switch to these other services instead, so it’s no longer a great benefit to provide free bish.net emails to the community. Because of this decline in use and the constant problems of keeping the service operational on a daily basis we are again considering closing the email service. This would only happen after a period of notice to allow remaining users time to make other arrangements, but please be aware that this free service is likely to close this year, and make other arrangements for email where necessary.
A notice will be posted here once the current service is operational again.
Update 26/04/17:
The problem has been resolved and email should now be operating normally again.