Tutor
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2 Messages
BlackBerry Classic will no longer connect to pacbell.net as of 06-15-2018
Yesterday afternoon my BlackBerry Classic smartphone displayed a message asking for email account information. I entered my username and password and nothing happened except a message stating that they could not verify my account. I have been down this road before so I deleted the account from the phone and attempted to re-add it using the defaults that have worked before (Yahoo!). No go. My email still worked on the PC so no issues there.
This morning I called tech support to try and resolve the issue and they said that because Yahoo was now owned by Verizon Yahoo was no longer hosting AT&T mail. No warning or notification that Yahoo was going to shut down their servers - they just flipped the switch and shut it down. They offered no solution except to tell me I should access my mail through att.net in the browser. It does work but I lose all of the advantages of having the mail application separate from the browser.
I contacted the AT&T tech support team later in the day and talked with a tech who eventually told me that AT&T does not support BlackBerry OS10 and that I should contact BlackBerry for a solution.
I went back in to try and manually configure email on the BlackBerry and noticed that I had several choices for mail systems (gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, POP and IMAP, among many. I decided to look up the server settings for IMAP and configured my email using the listed settings. Much to my surprise those settings worked!!! I ran a few tests and it appears that I am back in business. Changing the configuration from Yahoo to IMAP did the trick. Hope this might help others because tech support was clueless about the cause and a possible workaround. I admit that working with the BlackBerry OS is not something they do everyday but there are still those of us who like a phone with a real keyboard.
joeldf
ACE - Guru
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1.2K Messages
6 years ago
Yahoo mail has been flaking out for many people in the past week. The move to Verizon probably had something to do with it. Either way, you may need to look into another email service soon. Yahoo never fully followed standard email protocols, so you're lucky to get it working at all.
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rrschmidt
Tutor
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2 Messages
6 years ago
The tech I spoke with initially said that my POP3 Outlook client on my PC
would not work either, which is wrong. The Outlook POP3 client points to
att.net not yahoo.
What I have learned is that the Yahoo IMAP server that hosts the BlackBerry
email (yahoo.com) was shut down and AT&T didn't bother to tell us that it
was going away. The correct solution to this issue should have been to
inform the user to change the IMAP server settings to one that points to
imap.mail.att.net and smtp.mail.att.net. That is what I did and all is now
working. That change may be all that is needed to fix other smartphones that
run Android or IOS and use att.net email.
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bob_in_la
Tutor
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6 Messages
6 years ago
I have a Blackberry Z10 using Yahoo email (long story, don't ask why) and the email send function started to show "message could not be sent" in Blackberry Hub, but incoming mail still worked. From AT&T, they recommended setting connections to imap.mail.att.net and smtp.mail.att.net. That got the outgoing mail working, but incoming mail was then blocked. I then went back to rim.imap.mail.yahoo.com for incoming mail, everything works now but I'm not sure how much longer we can keep these Blackberry services alive.
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