Downloaded e-mails are no longer marked as read on att.net

Per AT&T the changes Yahoo made to their servers on 02/01/17 were by design.

In other words mail no longer marked as read when viewed with an email client is what they wanted. They will not be changing it back for AT&T. The only way they will change it is if they get more complaints from their clients.

Guess this is what you get when you outsource your email to some backwards thinking company. Time to switch email providers which will probably be a good thing as this provider has been nothing but trouble since day one.

That's correct. Emails are not being marked as read when retrieved with a mail client like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

Key date is February 1st. That's when all the recent email problems started happening. Wish AT&T was able to figure that out.

Do you know if they are looking at what they may have changed as of Feb. 1, that could cause the problem?/

Since it happend 8 days ago and the problem still exists I doubt very much anyone is looking into it.

It's been 10 days already. When will AT&T do something?

@ATTCares...or do they?

Just look at all the email problems being reported.

It's been 13 days already. When will AT&T do something?

On 2/10/17 I spoke with "Jeremy" at ATT regarding this issue.  He suggested some changes that I should make, some of which I did, and some of which I did not do (delete the accounts in both Thunderbird and Outlook!).  None of the things that he suggested resolved the issue.  According to him there is no issue with att.net, but that is due toThunderbird and Outlook no longer syncing with yahoo.  Usual help desk response, point the finger at the other system.  I KNOW how this works as I was a project manager for a major company in charge of systems with multiple touch points - when trouble shooting issues with any of the system interfaces, it was NEVER their code, but someone else's!  Anyway, "Jeremy said that he would check with the yahoo.net team and that they would send me an email if there is any issue.  I have received no email from them to date.

I did some further research, and here's my hypothesis of what has occurred. Both my and my wife's e-mail accounts are set up as POP3 accounts at att.net.  There is NO POP3 transaction (per RFC 1939) that can be sent from an email client (Thunderbird or Outlook) that will mark an email on the server as having been read.  My theory is that before 2/1/17, when an email client using POP3 retrieved messages, ATT had code on their server that immediately marked the retrieved messages as having been read.  As this was a non-standard email server customization, it was removed during a code release that was implemented in production on 2/1/17.

Is this why my e-mails are bouncing back, because it's not marked as read?

THIS IS HAPPENING AGAIN!!!!!!  I was just "given" an upgraded e-mail box from AT&T and now my e-mails are being duplicated with every download.  We need to get this FIXED!!!

@PinguC - how could something (marking server items as read when downloaded by a POP client) which was completely wrong, non-standard, and corrected if it really did happen 2 years ago, happen again?  Why would they re-implement non-standard behavior again now?  And by the way, they haven't.   Even the OP stated in post 7 flagging inbox items as read when downloaded by a client is non-standard.  And I can assure you it doesn't touch the server status when email is download as POP.  All you have to do is look at the webmail, which mirrors the servers, to see that a message, when downloaded by a POP email client, remains unread on the server, and hence reflected in the webmail.. Reading it in the client also doesn't affect the server/webmail.  Conversely reading in the webmail doesn't affect the client either. You can however configure a POP client to delete incoming messages from the server and that would reflect in the webmail as the message moving from the inbox to the trash.

Why are you emails duplicating?  Beats me.  But it isn't because inbox messages are remaining marked unread or even read for that mater on the server and hence on the webmail.  As I said your POP client couldn't care less about the read status on the server, only if the message is new to the client.  Check your webmail as I mentioned above to see if two instances of the messages are in your inbox.