Care4free email not working for 5 days

[#1]

Hi, 

I have a care4free email address and service for which PlusNet are now the service providers.
On Monday of this week (March 20th 2023) I stopped receiving or being able to send emails both on webmail and using my Outlook email client.

No settings were changed locally in terms of Outlook (POP/ SMTP) and the webmail keeps intermittently not even loading the inbox view. And when I press send/ receive, it returns a server fetch error [Connection Error - failed to reach the server].

Can someone help me restore my email service please? This is urgent, as I have been without email for days and am involved in urgent legal matters.

I realise PlusNet isn't supporting care4free anymore or offering any new email services, but in order to move away from care4free, the email account needs to be functioning.

[#2]

I think the first thing to check is that you’ve not exceeded the 250MB quota for the care4free mailbox. 

If you’re still getting an error when trying to load the mailbox in webmail, try the steps here.

Once webmail’s working as it should be, go to Settings at the top right then navigate to the Folders tab. 

I would make sure all of the folders are ticked and selecting each folder in turn, you can click on the Information tab to check the size.

[#3]

@Gandalf I have managed to view my webmail inbox by following these instructions but how do I check if I have exceeded my inbox quota? And secondly, how do I reduce my inbox quota if I have exceeded it, to get things working again? Is it just a case of deleting some emails?

Please confirm.

Thanks.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

There’s no easy way to check the mailbox quota. You’d need to add the size of each folder together by going to Settings, Folders, select the folder, then Information.

If you’ve exceeded the quota then yeah you’ll just need to delete mail and then empty the deleted items folder afterwards until the overall size is below 250MB.

[#5]

If you have exceeded the quota, deleting email might not be easy as there might not be enough space for the delete action moving the item to the trash folder.  Holding the SHIFT key whilst pressing the DEL key will delete the highlighted item IMMEDIATELY without moving to the trash folder.

[#6]

@Gandalf thanks 🙏🏾 your advice fixed the problem. 

Cheers.