Outlook Express.....switching to U-Verse (Solved)

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6185

We recently switched to ATT U-verse with Yahoo mail. (The one thing that made me hesitant...Yahoo.)

When we got it installed, the tech didn't set up the email. Silly me. I managed to do Road Runner all by myself, so how hard could it be? lol!

Anyhewww... I finally fiddled with the pop and smtp settings (since Yahoo blocks Port 25) without having to opt out of that, and after two days of playing around, I can now send and receive into OE. The major change I made was changing to smtp.mail.yahoo.com instead of just smtp.att.yahoo.com.

But there's this one little quirk. It seems to work fine if I've browsed first and then open OE. But if I go straight to OE, without browsing at all, it errors out just one time. Then when I try again it'll go through.

I think I remember something in a google search about the att.yahoo home page having to connect before OE will work too. I do have att.yahoo as the homepage in IE, but I use FF as my default browser and it's not set there. I plan to ditch it as a homepage anyway. (I hope I can! I prefer to open to a blank page.) I just kept it that way in IE because it was easier to find the att.yahoo site, as opposed to just yahoo. I always seemed to end up there instead. lol!

I can live with this minor inconvenience, but I'm just wondering if I'm missing some simple change in the OE settings that'll get rid of it.

Any ideas?

Gezzer · Joined: Oct 19, 2008 Posts: 179

on my yahoo account i have to enable web & pop access

when at your inbox on the right is the options button > mail options > pop accessing & forwarding > tick web & pop access

see if this gives any improvement â€¦

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6185

Geezer, I am looking right at my inbox. I am not seeing anything "to the right" that is an options button. I've looked in customize for the toolbar and nothing is in there either. I've also looked in Tools-Options and I can't find anything that even resembles "pop accessing & forwarding > tick web & pop access"

Am I having a Senior Moment? Do you have a map? lol!

Edit: I just figured it out. You're talking about my Inbox at yahoo. Well, it's already checked. Since I changed the smtp to "mail", I'll try unchecking it at yahoo and see what happens tomorrow, when I first start up my computer, before going on the web.

I'm always online now so it only happens the first time I try OE if I haven't opened my browser. I don't know how to turn off the "Gateway", as the tech called it. I used to turn off my Road Runner modem all the time. lol!

Edit #2. Never mind. Yahoo won't let me untick it.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1134 Location: Central FL, USA

My worst experience with this ATT/Yahoo BS involved two hours on the phone with so called "Help" people. The first one appeared to be in the US and spoke English but was of no help getting the email to work. A call back got me Habib in who the hell knows where. English was obviously NOT his first language. He kept saying "I fixie!". Confused

Cheeeech!

Anyway after another hour on the phone and still NO email, I apologized to him and then hung up on him.
I'm pretty sure I was talking to this guy:

<<-- click to expand

Anyway, after hanging up on him, I pulled up www.google.com and set my friend up with a GMail address and plugged it into Outlook Express (Actually Windows Mail, since it was a new Vista PC) and the whole job was done and working in five minutes.

So what was my final conclusion? Well it was "Screw AT&T".!!!!! Twisted Evil

Since then, I had to work on a PC that was set up to AT&T DSL with the CD that came with the install package. They had settings in O.E. that I'd never seen before. EVER!
But hey.....they worked.

But their so-called Security software had disabled or deleted all the Security Software I'd installed for him and that he'd been updating and using for over a year.
I had to disable all their crapware and reinstall Spybot S&D and Trojan hunter.

Anyway, I finally got it all fixed and working OK.
I wrote down all the AT&T settings for O.E.
Let me know if you want to compare notes! PM me.

The Doctor Cool

Edited: To correct several typos

Gezzer · Joined: Oct 19, 2008 Posts: 179

i am sorry mommabear i should have explained better
its just that i only use email via the web i don't have an email program installed on the system â€¦

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1134 Location: Central FL, USA

Mommabear,
I had to set up another AT&T DSL install today.
The CD crapped out soon after it started and I had to resort to the HELP line.
A little sweetie named Megan helped me...........for a half hour. She walked me thru all the setups.
The email setup was again different than anything I'd seen before. It seems like every time I see an AT&T setup, it's something different.

this one was
POP.mail.att.net
and
SMTP.mail.att.net

with servers:
Incoming at 465
and
outgoing at 995

Well at least that was standard. Rolling Eyes

After four hours on site, I was glad to be gone.
It took four beers to wash that nasty taste out of my mouth. Evil or Very Mad

I'm learning to really loath AT&T.

Doc Cool

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6185

Doc,
I'll give that and the other one a try. Although this one looks more promising since I'd already changed the smtp to mail. Don't remember if it tried changing the pop to mail earlier.

I know... searching att's and yahoo's "help" sites are as bad as trying to use Windows Help. (maybe worse.)

I haven't fiddled with anything yet. I'm still recovering from our 4 hour early voting adventure yesterday. Wouldn't have missed it for the world, but I'm pooped. Very Happy

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1134 Location: Central FL, USA

If I had just been able to get my customer's PC to go on-line, I would have set him up with a GMail address and forgotten the ATT/Yahoo crap all together.
But the problem was that the ATT Modem was not talking to the Servers at ATT.

Megan, the telephone Help Tech, was a real doll, very patiently walking me thru the process, while I was getting more IRATE and frustrated by the minute. My customer was sitting right beside me and wondering how the #%$&!# someone like him with NO computer expertise at all could be expected to accomplish such a task. Question

The program on the ATT install CD kept telling me to shut off the McAfee firewall, and there was NO McAfee anything even installed on the little PC. Since I couldn't shut off the firewall that wasn't there, the Install program told me to call the HELP line and it aborted.

[I later ran the "McAfee Removal Tool", to remove any McAfee entries that may have been in the registry, from the crap that was put on the little PC at the factory.]

The next time a customer asks my advise on getting an ATT DSL service, I'll just tell them to either forgetaboutit or get another service tech.

For anyone having troubles with the email from their ISP, I strongly suggest signing up with Google for a GMail account. Activate the POP3 functions and then program GMail into either Outlook Express for XP or Windows Mail for Vista.
All the instructions for doing that are on the GMail site, complete with pictures.

My email is important to me, so I set up O.E. to immediately go to the inbox and download mail when the program starts, then I put a shortcut to O.E. in my Startup folder.
I turn my PC on in the morning and then retire to the kitchen to brew up my first cup of coffee of the day. Somewhere around pouring the water into the little "Mr Coffee" machine, I hear "You've got mail" coming from my PC.
I snagged the female voice for "You've got mail" from a customer's PC, where they use "Compuserve".

Anyone who knows me, also knows that I like SIMPLE and my email don't get no simpler than 'Fully Automatic'.
Many of my customers have elected to let me set up their own email the same way.

I've also set O.E. to check my email every three minutes, all day long, while the program is 'Minimized'.

Mom, I hope that you either get that ATT mail figured out or just elect to go with GMail. (Did you try calling their HELP line? )

Good Luck,
The Doctor Cool

MDGnome · Joined: Aug 29, 2005 Posts: 19

I haven't used ATT/Yahoo in a while, but their support site used to be fairly straightforward. Did anyone get to this site:

http://helpme.att.net/article.php?item=287

It lists different pop/smtp servers and also requires SSL.

When drilling through the support website, I just kept looking for 'Yahoo'.

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6185

MDGnome,
thanks for jumping in. I've been to a bunch of att-yahoo sites and I've seen that one. I know what my settings are supposed to be. They just didn't work. Hence the hodgepodge combination of different settings that I found on Google that got things going, except for the fact OE never works on the first try of the day (or after a cold boot, I've now found out), unless I've previously opened a browser. In fact when I was getting errors both in and out at first , I got this email from Yahoo:

goretsky · Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2008 1:18 am Post subject:

Hello,

Does your email address end in yahoo.com? If so, perhaps these settings will work:

POP3 Server: pop.att.yahoo.com
POP3: Use an encrypted connection (SSL), POP3 port 995

SMTP Server: smtp.att.yahoo.com
SMTP: Use an encrypted connection (SSL), SMTP port 465

If those don't work, then perhaps it is time to call their technical support department and step through the settings for Microsoft Outlook Express with them.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1134 Location: Central FL, USA

Mom,
I have to set up many different ISP's and their associated email on many different PC's. NO TWO are the same.
I have a whole folder of setups that I carry with me in my "Kit".
Even AT&T can't decide on what setup they are going to use.
I have three customers in a five mile square that use AT&T and all of them have different setups for their AT&T email.
Cheeeech! Evil or Very Mad

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6185

Ok, folks. I give up. Spent about 3 hours on the phone with them last night. The first guy insisted it was my firewall, and then read his canned script so fast I could hardly understand him. pfftt.

The next person I called later was nicer. She said she did all kinds of things to our settings on their end. She confirmed my OE settings were correct. She even tried unblocking port 25. Her last suggestion was to delete my OE Identity and try a new one. No joy.

In no particular order:

I did the new identity.
I tried with my firewall turned off in msconfig.
I tried special rules in Sygate for the local and remote ports that showed up in the log.
I un-ticked block all traffic til Sygate is loaded.
I tried an alternate port I read about, (587).
It's not my antivirus. I have no real time scan for email.
I tried send-receive and send only in OE.
I tried making sure I had an email to receive before trying to send-receive.
I tried rebuilding my outbox and sent items .dbx in OE, on the off-chance they were corrupted.

Nothing leaves my outbox until I try again after the first failure., I can use OE all day long if I'm not trying to use OE after a cold boot or restart.

An odd thing I did notice though. On the first try to send after a cold boot or restart, the smtp port 465 does NOT show up in my firewall traffic log at all. So something is not connecting and I don't know why.

Hey Doc! This is probably a stupid question but my brain is mushed right now. From what I've read, I'm think I can forward my att-yahoo to gmail, and then use gmail to download them into OE.

If that's correct, then here's the million dollar question...

Is there any way to send/reply/forward emails from my OE/gmail setup, but still have the recipients see and reply (if they needed to) using only my att.net address?

I guess I'm just trying to avoid sending out a new, new email change to everybody.

My head hurts.

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 808

Just a thought...

Is there another EMAIL CLIENT you could use - something other than OE?
Not sure if Thunderbird can do this but trying something else may prove out the answer.

goretsky · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:59 am Post subject:

Hello,

Just to confirm, did you try uninstalling Sygate Personal Firewall?

It has been about three years since Sygate was acquired by Symantec and the product discontinued, so it may be that it is incompatible with some newer mail transfer setting now being used by AT&T U-Verse.

If it does turn out to be such an incompatibility, installing newer firewall software that works better with your ISP's mail servers would solve the problem.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1134 Location: Central FL, USA

zlim · Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 2422

I'll throw this in mommabear just to complicate things.

For about a month I couldn't get into my myway email account (it has been taken over by Bluetie/Excite). Finally tech support at myway, got me the proper url to go in and some some redirection.
Once I got in, I forwarded three saved emails to Yahoo. Then never arrived. I also signed up at a forum and used my yahoo address. The activation link never arrived. I suspect this a block on Yahoo's end.

I forwarded the same three emails from myway to Juno and they got there in a few minutes. I also re-signed up at the same forum but used my juno address and the activation email also arrived.

Bottom line: You can try forwarding but if Yahoo is involved, I don't know if it will work.

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 808

All this is why I don't use "online" email services for my PRIMARY email.

This would be a bit extreme but you COULD always set up your OWN email server. - provided of course that your ISP doesn't do something screwy to mess THAT up, too.

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6185

Well, to make a long story short. It's working now. I'm not sure why.

I did run their OE wizard again. Although honest to God, I couldn't "see" where it really did anything different. But that might have finally done it.

But then I had a problem with no copies being saved in the sent box. I remember reading something about that happening with att.yahoo.

By this time I'm not doing anything in logical order so I decided maybe Sygate is part of the culprit. I uninstalled it. The sent problem still continued. Then I remembered that I can rebuild it by deleting the dbx in OE. That fixed it.

So I put Sygate back on to see what might happen, and everything is still working. I'll research the sent box glitch and see what I can find out, should that start happening again.

Thanks everybody!

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 808

Now that you mention it, I seem to recall having a problem of some sort a good while back with those too. (DBX) I just wish I could remember the details of it as it might explain your situation. But sorry, just been to long. If I DO remember, I'll gladly pass it but I'd (at this moment anyway) would probably bet that, that was your problem all along. It really messed ME up as I DO recall.