CARE CODE: 205.2 [LU003] - Suddenly happened to my account and cannot login

We'd like to address your question, @rfmuller! 

A password reset is generally the first step in order to unlock accounts with Care Code 205.2. This is because it will sync your account. If this doesn't help, or you're unable to reset your account, we can manually sync it for you in a direct message/chat. This can mitigate the need to reset your password if it works.

Please let us know if you have any other questions! 

Raiden, AT&T Community Specialist 

 This can mitigate the need to reset your password if it works.

Wow, could you use any more wiggle words to keep from making a definitive statement?  Given that there are lots of people here who have had "manual" resyncs and still have the lockouts, I can see why you wouldn't want to do that.

Agreed...their last response contradicts itself (order of operations) and makes no common sense.  Sounds like their Network Security personnel need to take some refresher classes in basic router/firewall access control lists, since they seem completely useless to control what are essentially repeated DDOS attacks to their infrastructure...

...assuming their assertion of the network attacks are actually true -- I'm beginning to wonder.  It would be a convenient excuse that redirects the immediate blame, if instead there's some type of internal issue caused by AT&T themselves.

@rfmuller   All true.  My first theory way back around the beginning of the year when this had only been around for a couple of months was that Yahoo/AT&T had yet another data breach to add to the 3 Billion accounts that had been compromised in previous Yahoo debacles.

Then they moved to "sorry, can't give you a manual password reset" and I began to wonder if it was bigger than that.  The odd thing is in all of the previous Yahoo breaches the company didn't disclose it for quite some time but there were rumblings in the security community of dark web evidence of these not long after each breach occurred.   Yet not a peep about this one that started last October.

Nothing Yahoo/AT&T did between those early days and the first week of June (when ATTHelp suddenly said the quiet part out loud, that they had "bad actors" attacking the accounts) made any sense whatsoever.  But as you said, if that's true then how could it possibly still be an issue weeks later given that there are common tools out there to knock this down.

So I'm back to my favorite answer when confronted with why something bizarre is happening with Yahoo Mail.....who knows?  I wonder if I can copywrite that?  😁

So as advised I went to ATT chat and talked to someone in the Sign Out Mob ? or something like that. They re-synced my account and now the dreaded CARE CODE: 205.2 [LU003] message doesn't pop-up every time I try to log in to my email account. But now after a couple of hours when I go to open an email it tells me it can't open it and gives me a retry button. Of course that doesn't work and I then I try to open any of my emails and they all are broken. And then I noticed that my email list was frozen and no new emails were being retrieved. The only solution - so far - is to exit my email account and resign in and then the whole process repeats. I haven't yet timed how long it takes before my account freezes - even after choosing Keep me signed in - but maybe some other day as I just got my account re-synced with a working login. One step at a time - right AT&T?

Can you confirm if your able to access your account? Please let us know.

@ATTHelp - I'm still curious to know if this overarching issue (per the last 2 weeks of this thread) has been flagged as a chronic Problem (not individual incidents -- they all need to be linked to one master Problem ticket) and escalated in any way at all?

Kind regards,

Rich

Update:

Sometime last night (which would have been another 14 days exactly), my account password become inoperative and I was forced to reset it again this morning....I know that (unfortunately) other's are suffering this issue at increased intervals well inside of 14 days, but at least in my case I don't think there's any correlation (let alone root cause) regarding a DDOS attack taking out accounts, but instead, something going on internal to AT&T's email infrastructure/configs that they are unwilling/unable to address.

Hope the issue has stabilized for everyone else...

Best,

-=Rich=-

That "bad actors' theory is a bunch a baloney. I have a primary att.net email and 2 sub accounts linked to it. Then I have a completely not connected additional primary, that I occasionally log into but have not used and never sent or received an email with, I am just keeping if for when I change my email over at some point.&n(Edited per community guidelines)p; No one knows I even have this email address. It does the same thing. When I attempt to log in, same message about if you try too many attempts...... and I need to reset my password there too. So that theory about bad actors is just fantasy, an excuse to get you off CS back and somehow put the blame on you rather than the programming by ATT/yahoo.