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Fixing SMTP errors from Yahoo!/AT&T/SBCGlobal DSL

:: Thursday, April 24th, 2008 @ 11:22:18 pm

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This is really, really annoying. My parents have internet service provided via DSL from the convoluted company that is/was Yahoo!/AT&T/SBCGlobal. In the past, if I wanted to send email from my mail client while I was at home, I had to change my SMTP server to match AT&T’s supported server and use my parents’ account for password authentication. This is annoying enough. But recently, Yahoo!/AT&T/SBCGlobal has started requiring sender email registration to send e-mail from their already-locked down SMTP server (!).

I returned home tonight and tried to send e-mail (after changing the SMTP server). Mail.app threw an error, saying that my sender e-mail address wasn’t accepted. Luckily, Adam Nash had written a post about this issue just a couple of weeks ago, linking to Yahoo’s help page that tells you what you have to do, so I logged into my parents’ Yahoo!/SBCGlobal mail account to add and verify my sender email addresses. This is the only way I can send mail via SMTP from my parents’ place. Luckily, my parents don’t use the email address that came with their DSL, so we can effectively use it just to manage a list of authenticated sender addresses for our home connection.

But let’s say you have frequent visitors, all of whom use SMTP to send email from their laptops. In order to allow them to send mail via SMTP, you’d have to:

  1. give them your Yahoo!/AT&T account information for authentication
  2. add and verify their sender email addresses to your Yahoo! Mail account

This is RIDICULOUS.

I recommend boycotting DSL service from Yahoo/AT&T until they stop being so stupid. In fact, I had to order new DSL service yesterday, and this issue was the reason that I didn’t even consider AT&T for my service.

Incidentally, I use a SMTP server on port 2525 that was set up for me by AustinDev, and AT&T DSL seems to let it through. Fastmail.fm has proxy servers that respond to any port, but for some reason, their server doesn’t respond to 2525 when I try it from Mail.app. Too bad!

UPDATE – Chris says:

Go here: http://helpme.att.net/servabuse.php

From the drop down “*Abuse Type:” select “**Opt out port 25″

That looks promising!

| San Diego, CA | link | trackback | Apr 24, 2008 23:22:18
  • http://blog.adamnash.com Adam Nash

    It’s beyond ridiculous. Even for myself & Carolyn, I now have to have all of her accounts and my accounts “verified” on my Yahoo account.

    Google SMTP also works through their DSL, as long as you use the secure port. Of course, Google SMTP does its own fun trick – it converts every sender to your gmail account, no matter which account you actually sent the email from! (edits headers)

    Adam

  • http://www.austindev.com Chris Kacerguis

    Eric,

    Go here:

    http://helpme.att.net/servabuse.php

    From the drop down “*Abuse Type:” select “**Opt out port 25″

    Enjoy.

  • norm

    We just switched to use a different port as well. Our new ISP (COX) blocked 25 so we added a new port.

    This sentence is funny: Fastmail.fm has proxy servers that respond to any port, but for some reason, their server doesn’t respond to 2525 when I try it from Mail.app.

    Maybe it responds to almost any port.

  • Andy

    what drives me nuts is that you cannot use gmail’s SMTP servers, because it will make all outgoing mail look like your gmail account. Not cool. Not cool. So I just use my web site’s cruddy SMTP server when I leave home.

  • Jeff Laity

    Luxury.

    My corporate server is driving me insane. Channels everything through a proxy server at port 8080, so any other port is blocked except for web, ftp and email. This messes up Gogle mail and Gogle calendar. IMAP email is blocked. Blocks a ton of “offensive sites” like Facebook, MySpace and CraigsList. Any offensive language in outgoing email is bounced, which often gets me when I’m replying to someone and forget to clean up the language. For a while they were blocking INCOMING email with bad language and not informing either party! Of course I have to turn off the proxy server whenever I’m not using my laptop from work, since FireFox isn’t smart enough to automatically adjust. And download speeds at work are about 20KB/s on a good day because of all the spam filtering, apparently.

    OK, it’s not at all the same as your personal system that you pay for, but it still drives me batty.

  • http://admansblog.blogspot.com Adman

    It’s almost as if Yahoo/AT&T doesn’t want random people using their SMTP …

    Are you saying that you want to be in charge of who gets access to use their SMTP? What am I missing?

  • http://echeng.com echeng

    Chris — that may be the fix! I just gave it a try, and will report back later. Although, it may take me awhile to report back, since I almost never am home at my parents’ place.

    Oh, and I almost never use port 25. I usually use port 465. ;)

    Adam S. – No, I don’t want to tell AT&T/Yahoo who should be able to use their SMTP server. But I do want them to release port 25 to people who use them as an ISP. We don’t use their email service, but we have physical service from them at our home. Anyone who is on my connection should be able to send mail using a SMTP server of their choice.

    Not only does AT&T/Yahoo block port 25, but they now restrict the use of the only SMTP server they allow a connection to, effective cutting off SMTP for anyone who is not registered as a sender in their Yahoo! Mail service. This has the terrible side-effect of allowing the Yahoo! Mail account associated with the ISP service to send mail from anyone who is verified. So at the moment, my Dad can log into his SBCGlobal account and send email AS ME, simply because I want to be able to send mail from our home connection. This is all sorts of bad.

    Here is another scenario to illustrate how annoying it is:

    Let’s say that I use Yahoo/AT&T for my DSL service at home, but I don’t use Yahoo email. My email is at echeng.com. So I check e-mail using POP/IMAP at echeng.com, but I have to use AT&T’s SMTP server when I’m connected at home. That’s fine. But you have to authenticate using your AT&T/Yahoo email username and password. That’s a little annoying, but it’s still fine… only now, it won’t work. In order to send mail from my address at echeng.com using the AT&T SMTP server, I have to login to Yahoo email and add/verify my echeng.com email address. And if I have two email addresses, I have to add them both.

    This is annoying enough, but let’s say I have three roommates. In order for them to send mail using SMTP, I have to add their email addresses to my Yahoo email account!

    That’s the issue here.

  • http://www.shashachu.com/ Sha Sha

    I helped a friend’s dad with a similar problem (he was on pacbell.net and suddenly wasn’t able to send email), and all I had to do was check the box that said his outgoing server required authentication, and it worked.

  • http://echeng.com echeng

    Sha Sha — that’s not good enough in this situation. Yes, you have to authenticate using your Yahoo/AT&T login, but it checks the “sender” address in your outgoing mail. If it is not registered, the send fails. So in your case, if your sender address wasn’t your dad @ pacbell.net (he used another e-mail address), you would have had to register and verify it before it would have worked.

  • Aaron

    Eric,

    Thanks a bunch. I had a problem with Army Knowledge Online IMAP sending of email and the Yahoo thing did the trick. I wasted at least 2 hours searching the net before I came across this page. Now, AT&T will send things to my AKO mailrouter and I can function on the go. Cheers.

    Aaron

  • Androka Faradofay

    What’s even worse is if a small company is using ATT/Yahoo DSL with interns, co-workers, etc, coming and going, and they are trying to send mail using their mail.MYCOMPANY.com service. Suddenly no one can send email from their MAIL (mac) or Outlook (pc) clients. Well, you can “authenticate” upto 10 email addresses on the one account Yahoo gives you, but that’s it.

  • Warren

    Haven’t seen an update on this yet, but i’d like to know if **Opt out port 25 did anything for you on yahoo abuse page per Chris Kacerguis’ instructions.

  • William

    It gets worse! Just installed an NAS, and want to set up email alerts. But I can’t because ATT/Yahoo not only blocks port 25, but now apparently they’re blocking 465 and 587. Can’t use ATT smtp server because I can’t verify the sending email address – even if I knew what the NAS was using, they verify by sending an email back to the address, which of course would go to no where…

    I’m going to try the Opt Out form. We did this at home, and it worked for a while and then they killed it again.

    What a bunch of crap.

  • dottianne7

    Sounds like a problem I’m having but don’t see an answer. My problem is this. My ISP is Cox at home. At work, I am connected via LAN via At&T/Yahoo DSL. I realize I have to change my SMTP tags when I change locations but I have yet to get it working at work. Based on what I’ve read above so far, if my Cox email address is not “authenticated” on the company AT&T/Yahoo account, I can’t send out email (using Outlook 2007). BTW, I get email fine. Questions: 1 – how do I get my Cox email address authenticated? 2 – besides checking the box that states authetication required, what else do I need to do? 3 – what is a good port to use for SMTP? I read different ones above. 4 – whose username/password do I enter for question #2 – mine or the AT&T account?

    If I can get the answers to these questions ASAP, I can hopefully get this situation fixed…would like to test out tomorrow…at home now.

  • Bob

    Yes – it gets worse! AT&T has removed the ability for a non-business DSL account holder to remove the Port 25 block. If you have a business account, they’ll do it for you. Apparently they think customers will convert to a business account for this privilege.

    This is the kind of stuff that caused me to run to AT&T as the only alternative to Comcastigasm.

    But 24 hours after setting up their DSL “service,” I can’t use any of my long-time email accounts, all attached to their own smtp servers.

    To sum up: This is a load of crap.

  • paul smietan

    same problem here, Eric – is there an alternate port to use?

    -Paul

  • mark

    Located in VA with business relationships around the world, I have not had the displeasure of dealing with the ATT SMTP problem. I was not aware of the issue but heard of the possibility. After hours of troubleshooting, I realized and verified the problem. I solved the problem using SSMTP port 465. Since this is the port Gmail uses I doubt they will ever close it and no ATT verification needed. What made me flaming mad > I could not find a reference on their website.

  • Michael

    It isn’t getting any better. I received an email from AT&T yesterday afternoon that said they had “noticed” that I was sending email via a client that did not have SSL enabled.

    Hmmm.. I have 6 email accounts in Apple Mail. Mostly gmail accounts, my sbcglobal account, and one tied in with my work’s domain. ALL of them are set up to use SSL.

    So, after 30 minutes on AT&T’s worthless chat with idiots who don’t know which end of a power plug to put in a wall… I was finally told that I needed to chose between using my other email account’s smpt server OR AT&T’s smtp server. Period.

    After saying that this was not acceptable, she finally said that she too would hesitate to change my email settings since they are working. If I wanted to, I could just ignore the emails from AT&T warning of the smtp/SSL issue…. ummm…OK.

    So this evening… ALL outgoing email is blocked. Even my sbcglobal email not going out. Incoming still getting through. All of my accounts have been “verified” with AT&T/Yahoo as described here and other places. But I did not set all of my other accounts to use AT&T’s smtp server.

    Fed up is putting it mildly.

  • Deb

    Another one bites the dust…AT&T/Yahoo is outrageous! We switched from the SBC/ATT DSL service (where you could opt out port 25) to the new u-curse. They have removed the port 25 freedom choice entirely from the abuse page. You can’t send emails through another SMTP server, period. Doesn’t look like port 25, 465, or anything works without their eavesdropping.

    Had to add and verify the sending email addresses from within ATT/Yahoo email account and the verified accounts. Then had to change the outgoing settings to HELP THEM ENSURE THE SECURITY OF MY EMAIL:

    Change the POP server to pop.att.yahoo.com. (didn’t do)

    Change the SMTP server to smtp.att.yahoo.com.

    Check the option labeled Use an encrypted connection (SSL).

    * Change the SMTP port to 465.

    Check the option labeled Use an encrypted connection (SSL).

    * Change the POP3 port to 995. (didn't do)

    Couldn’t they just pass through port 25 traffic to someone else’s server, which is what we all wanted in the first place? Suggested addition to their email configuration changes:

    Run screaming for the hills in frustration. (did do)

  • http://www.hell.com corey bryant

    Oh god, I thought this was the issue. I just moved to a semi-rural area in Texas and the only service offered here is AT&T. I assumed I’d plug the computer in, and be able to send and recieve email from 5 corporate email servers (which I maintain at my office) — port 25 is blocked hey? I sat here for a long time and tried to think of a legitimate reason for them to block smtp ports. I’m going to miss Time Warner – and unfortunately the condo I just bought is wired for AT&T, and is locked down. No hope. I regularly get attachments in excess of 12MB, so I’m sure those would be kicked back should I dare to use AT&T’s craptastic server. I guess I’m going to put that extra box in my office to work, throw our mailserver software on it, change the port and bounce just my mail off of it. I can’t really change the port on the servers themselves, as I have way too many clients in the field, and I don’t want to go there. =)

    Why is AT&T so stupid?

  • John

    Set up new server at new isp. New isp was a tad slow setting up rDNS (2 days).

    Sbcglobal BLOCKED all mail from new server due to no rDNS.

    Upon request for removal (after setup rDNS) using the assigned request form, sbcglobal / ATT admins said “sure” – and promptly converted the lockout from “bad rDNS” to “spammer”.

    Since then, every request for removal gets a “we already removed you” canned response – and we’re still blocked.

    I propose we all play their game – implement reverse DNS lookup on every web page and mail server – and lock-out all sbcglobal and ATT networks. Serve up a page to the customers of those networks that spells it out – and directs them to contact their customer service department about being censored from the ‘net.

    Easy to implement – easy to reverse as soon as the creeps quit their silliness…

  • Simon

    The AT&T FAQ says, port 587 should be used, which worked for me.

  • http://www.luros.org Jason

    I just got off the phone with AT&T Residential DSL Support. Apparently, Level 1 Technical Support representatives are trained to tell you that the Port 25 block is permanent, irreversible, and for your own protection (all wrong). I asked that my call be escalated to Level 2, who after waiting on hold for close to 15 minutes, were able to reverse the Port 25 block in about 90 seconds. After rebooting the DSL modem, all is well.

  • Pingback: Geek with an Attitude » Blog Archive » AT&T Yahoo: We Don’t Need Your Business

  • Sandeep

    Ah! What a chronicle here. I just got off the phone with At&T tech support and am fuming as they said I will need to upgrade my account! I have had this account for a few years and recently started working on an SMTP program. For local testing I needed to send stuff to myself and lo and behold IT doesnt work. TRaced it to this port issue.

    Now, when I signed up for DSL, they didnt disclose this at all. That I wont get all the ports! Is this legal? they can just take away ports at will? Why should I need to upgrade to a business account for a port?

    I m PO!

  • Enny

    I use also port 587 as normal smtp port. That is the message-submission-port. Some email providers may not support/offer that.

  • Chad

    Thanks Enny, I just setup using port 587 and things are working so far.

  • http://www.adifferentcpa.com missy sanford

    I can’t go to http://helpme.att.net/servabuse.php to opt out of port 25 because they are blocking all e-mails. Doesn’t att.net have another way to reach in this instance??

  • Darryl

    Called ATT tonight. Got a very helpful tech with an @2WIRE.COM email address. He had me go into the router’s firewall. I went and UNchecked SMTP “allow” and that stopped the block. He was confused. He actually went and checked on it and replied: “I apologize. I know the SMTP issue is counter-intuitive with our router. There was a change in the firmware for your device and the option is in fact reversed. The only thing I can tell you is that it is being worked on and AT&T will provide updates when available. Thanks again!”

    Try REMOVING the check to ALLOW SMTP traffic. That permitted free flow. Also, this is on ATT UVERSE. Thanks for your posting here!

  • madhatterleather

    I was on the phone with the idiots for 3 hours. At first my send and receive didn't work one morning. After three hours of dicking around with 2 levels of support i can recieve but not send. The said the problem was on my side because I didn't have the Outlook 2003 sp3.

    I tried to install the sp3 but my outllook was OEM with my computer so I had no key. works out the Outlook sp3 has nothing to do with email.

    I upgraded my computer and bought an office with Outlook 2007 but it still won't send with the settings and servers they told me to use. I really dread getting on that phone to get to a level three support. What a bunch of assholes.

  • Hancockshazard

    Link to Yahoo help page is gone but if you go to Options, More Options, Accounts there is a button in menu bar to ‘Add Account’.

  • Boycott ATT

    Yes, I think you are correct! We should take them tho court, if we have a chance!. Meantime, I will switch ISP!.

  • Hans

    all out going port 25 on sbc/dsl are blocked. if you have a mail server you need to relay it to there smtp server through port 465 with authentication. you can send up to 250 email a day.

    This is to stop spammers from using there servers.

  • Gbar457442

    I send my e-mail the same way i used to but I keep getting reports that it is not being delivered because they are going to the wrong email contact addresses. The contacts are correct but the mail goes undelivered. I still receive incoming, but no outgoing. GPB
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