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rochrunner's profile

Mentor

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98 Messages

Tuesday, January 28th, 2014 3:25 PM

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AT&T SMTP now enforcing "From" email address

I posted earlier about not being able to send email via SMTP and have now figured out the problem. Starting within the last day or so, they are now checking to see that the "From" address on outgoing email matches your AT&T email address and, if not, are rejecting it. This is probably an anti-spam measure, but can cause problems.

 

This is a problem for me since I have my own domain so that I can publicly use an address such as "me@mydomain.com" and have it forward to "me@att.net". The advantage is that I can switch ISPs (which I have done a couple times) without having to change my email address in dozens of places around the web, notify contacts, etc. Email addresses are often used as account logins these days, so changing it is a huge honking deal!

 

I could still use "me @mydomain.com" as the "Reply-to" address, but this can confuse people since they will still see both this and my att.net address and probably not know which is which. So I am going to have to use a different SMTP server to send from my AT&T account in my client email program, which is doable but a hassle.

 

For what it's worth, Gmail's SMTP servers also do not like this, but they will actually change the From address to match the account used to log onto the server (the reason why that's not a solution for me either).

Contributor

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1 Message

10 years ago

Same problem here. Had this issue when 1st signing up for U-verse last year. Several phone calls and much time involved with a thoughtful U-verse rep finally fixed it. However, we knew something changed over the weekend as outgoing stopped working Sunday night. Regardless of it's nature(port blocking, etc), if I don't find a solution this week, I'll be forced to drop U-verse altogether as I can't send email.

Teacher

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6 Messages

10 years ago

Success! I looked into the email settings at my own hosting company, which is Hostgator. In CPanel, I accessed the email I use and then selected "Configure Email". It gave me settings for Outgoing SSL, which used Port 465. I also had to use the name of an SMTP server that was specific to my account and Hostgator, which I won't bother with posting because it won't help most people. I have to authenicate outgoing email, but had to do that anyway.

 

So the more generic solution is to check with your hosting company and see if they offer an SMTP server using a port other than 25 if you don't want to wrestle with ATT support.

 

I have to admit I'm still adding looking for an another ISP to the "to do" list. It's only a matter of time before 587 (and 465) become overrun unless there's an upgrade to the technology I don't know about. (Totally possible given that I'm in a different field now. 🙂 ) At any rate, the automatic block on 25 was never the way to solve the issue nor was turning off everything but ATT.net and letting us mere customers find out about it by letting it break.

Teacher

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6 Messages

10 years ago

@rochrunner- Thanks for the tip - it led to my returning to sucessful outbound email. My solution at my hosting company is basically the same but with a different port number. Good luck! 🙂

Tutor

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6 Messages

10 years ago

rochrunner, thanks to you, I can now send emails through 1&1 using an email account associated with my website....thanks

 

I still need to be able to send email from my personal ***@Outlook.com account...am I doomed?

 

[edited for privacy]

Tutor

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2 Messages

10 years ago

That's not really an option when AT&T also blocks port 25 - which is what many of the other ISPs use

ACE - Expert

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34.7K Messages

10 years ago


@glr wrote:

rochrunner, thanks to you, I can now send emails through 1&1 using an email account associated with my website....thanks

 

I still need to be able to send email from my personal ***@Outlook.com account...am I doomed?

 

[edited for privacy]


You can use Outlook.com's own SMTP servers, they can use port 587 if 25 is blocked.

 

See http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/send-receive-from-app

 

Tutor

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6 Messages

10 years ago

Outbound is suddenly working fine...

Tutor

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2 Messages

10 years ago

After spending two hours with support and getting nowhere, I decided to call it a night and talk with a specialist the next morning.  Somehow, during the night, my Thunderbird started working again as well.  But no, the problem wasn't anything that got changed on their end. Smiley Frustrated

ACE - Expert

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34.7K Messages

10 years ago

Someone may have misconfigured something that they weren't supposed to put their fingers in.

 

Apparently, there is no such policy shift to require an ATT.NET from address to send via ATT.NET SMTP servers at this time.  

 

Scholar

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80 Messages

10 years ago

Well its a week and counting for me and still the crack tech staff at AT&T can't figure out why their email server now sometimes rejects my outbound emails sent from my email client Agent.

 

Two clues:

 

1. They (AT&T) admit they didn't set up my AT&T email correctly on their end.

2. Agent clearly shows it makes a connection and reports "connection refused".

 

You don't have to be a technical guru to figure out something is obviously wrong on AT&T end.

 

Lets see what we can find out. Agent also shows the IP address it is trying to connect to which is 98.139.211.230. OK, lets do a whois lookup for this IP.

 

Results:

 

OrgName: Yahoo! Inc.
OrgId: YHOO
Address: 701 First Ave
City: Sunnyvale
StateProv: CA

 

So in spite of being told to enter outbound.att.net as the email server to connect with the IP address resolves to a Yahoo location. So...

 

1. that's the incorrect email server to point to

2. AT&T and/or Yahoo still don't have my correct email address set up.

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