Tutor
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5 Messages
Outgoing email stopped working
I have a bellsouth.net email address.
This morning email (POP) stopped working on all my devices. (Could not send or receive.) I was forced to logon to Yahoo, agree to new terms, and now I can receive email again.
However, outgoing SMTP is no longer working. I have deleted and readded the accounts and Ive used both the ATT settings (outgoing.att.net) as well as the Yahoo settings. I get failures in Thunderbird (An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Request failed; Mailbox unavailable. Please verify that your email address is correct in your account settings and try again) and on my mail client on my phone.
I am using a different reply-as address since I use this email account for business purposes and have a mail-forwarding account thru a professional organization. I had to "verify" this address several years ago. I assume the issue is that something has changed either at Yahoo or ATT and I need to re-verify but I cannot any information on how to do this on either the Yahoo or ATT pages. How do I use a different reply-as address from my email client using a bellsouth.net email address.
Thanks.
atxatx1
Tutor
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10 Messages
5 years ago
to send email or the email portion of Seamonkey?"
I'm using Seamonkey's email client and ATT's inbound.att.net and
outbound.att.net - just as I have since they made the switch from the yahoo
inbound servers. Nothing changed on our part.
Re "But I suspect there is a check of the reply-to you set in the identity and
the list of webmail send-only addresses."
I agree - but I think that it's more of an oversight error - lack of attention
to detail in their authenticating - than an intentional blocking.
"I assume if they are not verified (which is done when you create them) or not
even in the list then the server isn't even going to let an email client use it
either."
I've had the email accounts a lot longer that the att.net account and we can
send to the business email account.
"So it's the webmail's send-only and reply-to settings I am asking about and how
it correlates with the client's Default Identity email address setting."
The reply-to setting kicks back all of the non-att.net email addresses that I've
tested, incl. gmail.com and live.com. Our business account is on a separate
server that receives and sends normally to several people and devices.
I've done all of the things that the 'customer service' would recommend -
changing profiles, deleting accounts, etc... - same result. So evidently att.net
sees the 'From' and the 'Reply-to' as one line item instead of two. So whatever
email address is in the 'Reply-to' that is not att.net, or our att.net, it gets
kicked back as 'mailbox not found'. This is also why I attribute it to
incompetence more than design.
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atxatx1
Tutor
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10 Messages
5 years ago
but no one at AT&T thinks it should have ever worked that I was able to talk to."
They don't know why it worked and don't know why it isn't working - the person
you're talking to is reading from a script. They're experts in that they've been
trained to read from the script.
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dmaestro
Contributor
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3 Messages
5 years ago
I discovered the same problem with attempting to send through smtp.mail.att.net port 587. After spending over 10 hours with tech support for my new at&t internet account, I finally got an @att.net address set up that has worked fine since then. I also use a reply-to: for my personal email address (heaven forbid I should depend on AT&T / Yahoo for my primary email!).
On the phone with a better-than-average (for AT&T) tech support person yesterday, we also tried webmail, which failed with the SAML Auth error from the att.net site, but worked from yahoo.net - I don't know how closely related that is, but certainly indicates a problem on AT&T's side.
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dmaestro
Contributor
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3 Messages
5 years ago
And, yes, I just checked that changing the reply-to to my att.net allowed email to be sent - but does *NOT* solve the problem.
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_xyzzy_
Expert
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15K Messages
5 years ago
@atxatx1
I wasn't referring to your email accounts (att or business) and whether you can send to them. I was referring to the send-only email addresses in the webmail (not your email client) settings, i.e., whether the business email address is in the send-only list and is verified there. Creating one there goes through an explicit verification step. Again it has nothing to do with the fact that the email address is valid because you can send to it. The send-only address needs to be "convinced" of that when it tries to send the "please verify" to that address.
Could be that's the difference, i.e., accounts with att.net domains work and legacy account domains don't. That would be yet one more thing att and yahoo botched up in the "great ummerge" fiasco.
Yes the level 1 "droids" (as I refer to them) IMO know nothing about email. If it isn't on their script they are in the dark. I am not sure how much better the Digital Assistance Center (877-273-2728) is but you might give them a call.
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atxatx1
Tutor
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10 Messages
5 years ago
problem.
For example, I just put our business email address in the From: field - left the
"Reply-to" field empty - I got the exact same '.... mailbox unavailable error
message. So - it seems that the "From" and the "Reply-To" fields aren't
separated like they should be on the server somehow.
So if it worked for everybody previously - now it works for nobody - then
someone at att messed something up.
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_xyzzy_
Expert
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15K Messages
5 years ago
@atxatx1
I thought I said it works for me.
But I do know how to reproduce the "mailbox unavailable" error and it is as I thought. For example, I have three send-only addresses defined in the webmail.
I have my att email account set up in my Thunderbird (TB) which of course will use the att/yahoo email servers (POP in my case). TB's Identity is also set to replyto@c.com so any email I compose in TB will have a From specifying replyto@c.com. In the two cases below I try to send to xyz@foo.com where that is some other actual email address that exists so I won't mention that again. So here's two cases with different reply-to set in the email I am composing:
Case 1: From: replyto@c.com, Reply to: unverified@b.com. Results in "mailbox not found".
Case 2: From: replyto@c.com, Reply to: verified@b.com. xyz@foo.com successfully receives email.
So I am now pretty sure the "mailbox not found" error is tied directly to the send-only addresses in the webmail. Maybe you should try recreating it in the webmail. Remove it and re-add it to go through the verification step. This might be considered akin to the problem many legacy account users are having getting their passwords to work and the common suggestion (see top right of this page) is to create a new account password. My theory about that has always been because the passwords weren't transferred properly in the unmerge and creating a new one corrects the user's account record(s). Maybe something similar is going on here too with the webmail send-only verification status and hopefully recreating the send-only address corrects that information too. Still a theory though but should be easy enough to test out.
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jsander142
Contributor
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2 Messages
5 years ago
I have an att.net account and am having the same problem. When I removed my non-att.net "reply to" address, the message went right through. I have used an email forwarding service with a non-att.net address for 20+ years and used to be able to have that address in the "from" line. Now not even in the "reply to."
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atxatx1
Tutor
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10 Messages
5 years ago
go through the verification step."
I'll give it a try - I use Seamonkey and have never had an issue until now -
don't even know what the verification step/process is with att - but will try to
figure it out.
Thanks.
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_xyzzy_
Expert
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15K Messages
5 years ago
It's pretty easy and all this should probably be done in the browser (except maybe step 7):
At this point the send-only address should be verified. If you refresh the webmail Mailboxes settings page, if all went well, the send-only address will be on the list with nothing to the right indicating it is not verified. You now should be able to choose it for the default webmail account reply-to setting or the From when you compose an email in the webmail. And hopefully it should (now) be a valid reply-to in your email client as well. If it's not it's back to the old yahoo-is-not-handling-send-only-emails-for legacy-accounts properly. At which point I give up.
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