AT&T, SMTP & External Email

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I’m posting this as a service for all those people who have AT&T Uverse or DSL, who need to use the AT&T smtp server to send mail from non-AT&T accounts.

I was thisclose to throwing patio furniture at the next AT&T truck to enter my neighborhood, when I finally found the necessary solution on an external forum. Because I KNOW I’ll need it again, and because I suspect there are folks who don’t want to hunt down forum posts, I’m posting it here.

Several months ago, shortly after we canceled our ComCast account and switched to Uverse, which also required killing our backup DSL account (also through AT&T), we had to change all our mail settings because AT&T blocks port 25. No big deal, you just set your mail server to use port 465, and use login/password authorization based on your AT&T account.

For a while all worked sweetly. Then, one day in December or January, I stopped being able to send mail. Now, while I HAVE an at&t address, I don’t actually USE it, because I have my own domains. I also have work email addresses at their own domains. My Dreamhost accounts all have their own smtp servers, so that was fine for sending, except my parents’ server in Mexico wouldn’t accept relayed mail. The work pops don’t HAVE smtp service.

We called AT&T and explained the error, which at first was intermittent – maybe one in 12 email messages would bounce back with an error message that the server didn’t recognize my address. AT&T said, “Oh, we’re having a glitch.” The next day, all was well.

But then we started getting the error again, more and more often. Another call to Uverse tech support. “We can unblock port 25 for you, until we figure out what else to do.” Fine, okay. We have anti-virus and anti-spam software like crazy on our systems. We could deal with that. Except that after three weeks of this, we got a note from AT&T telling us that if we didn’t stop using port 25, they’d forbid us from relaying anything.

We complained about that. They apologized.

Meanwhile, when I tried to use the secure settings, I was getting more and more errors, until finally, this morning, I could not send mail at all. I sent in a ticket, they said, “We can’t find a problem, and we can’t reproduce it.”

I began searching the net for external information – users talk, after all – and found out that in order to send from an external email address, even if you’re using your own mail client (Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc.) you have to log into your AT&T/Yahoo webmail, and add and verify all your external accounts.

Now, while this is time consuming, it’s not that difficult, and I’d have happily done so months ago, but AT&T NEVER TOLD US TO DO THIS. There was never an email sent, when the secure servers became required. The various calls and letters to tech support never included this information in their responses. And honestly, who would think to go to a webmail account they never use to set up external mail relay for sending through a regular client?

In any case, I spent about twenty minutes going through the necessary steps this morning, and while Thunderbird still can’t FIND my smtp server on my MacBook, Mac Mail works fine, and Thunderbird on my windows machines works fine, and life is good.

If you, too, need to make external email work on AT&T’s secure servers, the instructions you need are here:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/manage/sendfrom-07.html

11 thoughts on “AT&T, SMTP & External Email”

  1. Awesome post… I just spent the last two hours pulling hair out tweaking my Apple Mail smtp settings. Thank you!!!

  2. I’d have been tearing out my hair in frustration, Melissa. Those technical problems, seemingly without solution at the time, are just so damn irritating.

  3. I can’t believe you just posted this yesterday and I needed it today! Thanks SO much!

  5. I feel your pain, unfortunately I still feel my pain. We’ve been through the trouble ticket thing with AT&T for 2 weeks now. We did everything they have asked us to do, verify the accounts, change the smtp settings, etc.) but we still have intermittent problems sending email from our own domain email accounts. I just had to click “SEND” 34 times to get Mac Mail to send an email this morning. AT&T’s lack of consideration for making these changes without so much as an email or letter to us DSL customers is unheard of. I’m looking for an alternative.

  6. Thanks for this post. I think we have FINALLY sorted out our email issues, after a few weeks of things getting progressively worse. I am quite fed up with AT&T. I’ve noticed that I need to watch my bill like a hawk, because the majority of the most recent bills I’ve gotten from them have had errors. (False charges, etc.) I’ll bet they make a lot of money from stuff like this…I mean, who really takes the time to go through their phone bill with a fine tooth comb? Yikes. Anyway, though, I didn’t mean to rant, I really did mean to say thanks for the helpful post. :-)

  7. That verification did not work for me. After tryhing to verify from Netscape and Firefox where it did not work I finally got through on IE and I still need to click repeatedly to send mail from my netscape program. I think it’s just another ATT-Yahoo ploy to collect valid user emails. Anybody knows free SMTP servers (besides Google that rewrites your From address)?

  8. Good to see I am not alone, AT&T are really messing me around on this one too. Went through the above steps, worked for about a day then just stopped working. If I hit send and receive, oh, I don’t know, 20 times, a message might get through. Looks like the only solution is to purchase some sort of third party SMTP service, what a pain, I found plenty of “free” smtp services but I find it difficult to trust them. Tried using Gmail, but then it adds the “on behalf of” on each email. Hmmmm

  9. I was having intermittent problems that would go away if I clicked Send/Receive 10 times, but then it just died. I was so frustrated. Thank you SO MUCH.

  11. Great post says it all. I’m sure whoever came up with this brilliant plan got paid a lot of money. I would have happily done the same job of screwing everybody up for a quarter of the price.

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