[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Email is broken - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Mon, May 26 2008 18:43 bradley

Email is broken

On the continuing thread of "Email is broken" is the latest saga in my continued attempt to keep my sbradcpa-at-pacbell.net email address.  I used to have sbradley-at-ix.netcom.com (yes I'm that old on the Internet) and then when Pacific Bell offered dial up and later DSL I signed up for the pacbell.net alias.  But lately their attempts to clean up the spam issue has nearly made the email address unusable.

People can't email me and have to use the contact box on the blog to email me when their email is blocked.

Subscriptions that I've signed up for are bouncing.

I write for windowssecrets.com and I pay for a paid subscription (just so I can keep track of when the articles go out the door and what they look like after final edits). So here is a subscription I pay for that is bouncing because SBCGlobal/Yahoo/Pacbell's attempt to de-spamify my malbox ends up with email bouncing.

Dear AT&T Yahoo, whatever you've done, it's not working.  Oh and I am using ssl connections so I'm not sure what they are talking about.

 
Dear AT&T Yahoo! Customer:

We noticed that you are accessing email using non-secure settings in your email software.

We would like to ensure that your AT&T Yahoo! Member ID, password, and email messages are transmitted securely between your mail software (such as Outlook or Outlook Express) and the AT&T Yahoo! Mail servers. In order to meet this need, please enable SSL via the instructions that are available on the Help site.

Since multiple email notifications have already been sent out about this, we request that you please make the necessary changes immediately. Remember, you need to make these changes if you want to continue to send/receive email using a mail client.

Thank you for your cooperation,

AT&T Yahoo! Customer Support

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# re: Email is broken

Monday, May 26, 2008 11:14 PM by Chris Knight

Yeah, it's a real problem when the big players can't manage it properly - it renders a technology infrastructure useless.

Australia's two largest telcos manage to screw up e-mail on a regular basis. It makes it more difficult when their helldesks don't even know who to escalate the problem to either :-(

Forget the cybercrime and e-terrorists - they're here in the form of incompetent ISPs.

# re: Email is broken

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:02 PM by Nick

Susan,

We run into this stuff a lot (Old Pacbell area), it sounds like you need to go in and "upgrade" your account. The easiest thing to do is try logging into Yahoo mail with your pacbell creds, if you get a message stating that an account does not exist, you’ll need to "upgrade" the account.

The URL to upgrade/activate the AT&T/Yahoo settings is http://helpme.att.net/register.

Your symptoms sound like that's the issue. Very frustrating indeed.