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

By: William

William — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:08:05 +0000

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.

By: Warren

Warren — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:06:20 +0000

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.

By: Androka Faradofay

Androka Faradofay — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:43:24 +0000

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.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:29:43 +0000

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

By: echeng

echeng — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:38:46 +0000

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.

By: Sha Sha

Sha Sha — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:51:39 +0000

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.

By: echeng

echeng — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:11:25 +0000

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.

By: Adman

Adman — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:47:14 +0000

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?

By: Jeff Laity

Jeff Laity — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:20:45 +0000

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.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:45:55 +0000

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.