Did you understand what I was trying to tell you apparently happened with my email? I know they were doing some work on the email server part of my ISP a while back...and it was about that time that my OE quit working.
Yah. I think so. Sounds like they changed their internal DNS records and naming of servers and such. That's why the thing that worked before (just pointing to the top level domain name instead of a particular server address) worked before but suddenly stopped working.
DNS (Domain Name Service) is a frequent culprit in ISP troubles. It is really easy to booger up, and it takes literally *forever* to fix. It's hard to explain... but it's like this...
DNS is the stuff that converts a name (like "www.freerepublic.com" into a number... the actual IP address of the machine that is supposed to respond to the request. In that case... FR is 209.157.64.200.
My company controls DNS for our domain. In this sense we are our own ISP and we connect to AT&T's internet backbone with a pair of T3's (its not important what those are). Any time we add or remove a server (like www. or webmail. or pop. or whatever) in our domain we have to make the corresponding change to our DNS servers, so that people using web browsers can find those machines when they type it in. DNS changes take time to filter out to all of the millions of DNS servers around the Internet.
In some ways it's a half-life sort of model. Every 24 hours, about half of the remaining servers on the Internet will finally get the new information. In the first day, half the internet gets it... in the second day half of the remainder gets it, in the third day half of the remainder gets it... and so on and so on... until about two weeks later enough of the internet has gotten updated with the latest data to call it "finished".
It works most of the time, but if you mess it up it can take a week or more to really fix it.