Sending email in Outlook using a non ATT email address over an ATT DSL connection

I just killed a good part of my day trying to figure out how to get Outlook (2007) to send mail with AT&T DSL’s SMTP settings. Now, I have configured Outlook several times in the past with various ISPs and didn’t have any problems as long as I had the proper setup instructions. We had SBC/AT&T DSL a couple years ago and email receiving and sending was fine. This time, however, I was stumped.

The handy booklet that comes with AT&T’s DSL modem has these instructions (which can also be found if you Google various phrases such as “Outlook AT&T DSL SMTP”):

If you use client mail and have trouble sending or receiving email, the problem could be incorrect settings. In this case, you need to enter this server information to tell your program where to retrieve your mail:

Your Email Address; For example, user@att.net or user@sbcglobal.net
Incoming (POP): pop.att.yahoo.com
Outgoing (SMTP): smtp.att.yahoo.com (SMTP authentication required*)
Incoming mail port #: 995, secure connection (SSL) checked
Outgoing mail port #: 465, secure connection (SSL) checked

*You should find the authentication check box in the outgoing mail section of your account setup. For specific instructions, refer to the help section of your email client.
NOTE: If your email client does not support SMTP authentication, you won’t be able to send client email from your AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet account.

All well and good. I have ten or so email accounts that I check through Outlook. Here’s what I did:

  1. In Outlook, I went to Tools > E-mail Accounts > View or change existing email accounts.
  2. I selected my first email account and clicked Change…
  3. My former settings were already there (with Comcast info). I edited them so that they had the following information:
    1. Your name: Corrie Haffly
    2. Email address: [my-email@my-domain.com]
    3. User Name: [my-email@my-domain.com]
    4. Password: [my-password]
    5. Incoming mail server (POP3): [pop.my-domain.com]
    6. Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.att.yahoo.com (note: depending on which AT&T provider you have, this may be different – log in at AT&T Help or look at the possibly out-of-date chart here)
  4. I clicked the More Settings button.
  5. On the Outgoing server tab, I checked “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication.” I selected “Log on using” and entered my AT&T user name and password.
  6. On the Advanced tab, I checked “This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)” and changed the port to 465.
  7. I repeated this for each email account.

The above configuration is correct, however, it didn’t work for me. I tried various combinations without effect. Finally, I found a solution after contacting tech support.

As I beat my head against the desk and tried different things, I finally found an error message by using the “Test Account Settings” button in Outlook:

Send test e-mail; the specified server was found, but there was no response from the server.

 

Finally, the actual solution to get a non att email address to send through an att dsl connection:

Searching with keywords on that phrase brought me to a forum post that pointed me to this Yahoo Help article which explained the real issue: My email accounts had to first be verified. The Yahoo Help page basically explains the steps you need to take to verify EACH email account through Yahoo. Once verified, emails can be sent in Outlook using the settings described above.

I found that simply leaving the Yahoo window open and manually entering the verification code, as suggested in Step 9a-d, didn’t work for me. Step 9e, entering in my password, would shoot me out to the AT&T Yahoo! home page without actually processing the verification. I only got results if I clicked the verification link that came in the email for that specific account (I was using Firefox 3, didn’t try any other browsers).

I also skipped the step where you enter in your server info, as I didn’t want to check these accounts via the Yahoo interface.

I also read that you’re limited to 10 email accounts. I actually had 11, but luckily could ditch one without consequence.

Before I could verify my emails, though, I had one more atypical road bump. When installing AT&T DSL last night, I chose to do a manual install instead of using their install CD. During the AT&T DSL registration process, I created a username and password successfully, but the next page didn’t load properly for me. I went ahead and activated the modem with my new user/pass successfully, so I didn’t think anymore of it. However, it seems that simply creating a username/password wasn’t enough – it didn’t actually create or activate the account to allow me to access Yahoo!/AT&T services. So when I tried to log in at http://mail.yahoo.com with my username and password, it told me that my ID didn’t exist. I had to go back and go through the registration process again (it worked, this time) to be able to access Yahoo Mail and thus Yahoo Mail options.

So this ended up being a three step process for me…

  1. Register new AT&T/Yahoo! ID properly.
  2. Set up Outlook settings properly (which I did in the beginning).
  3. Verify each and every email account using Yahoo! Mail options.

I’m still very disappointed with the AT&T live chat support that I interacted with. Is it really such a rare occurrence for someone to want to use a non-AT&T email address that they never run into this? Or was it a ploy to get me to pay for tech support? Seeing as how verifying email addresses through Yahoo was an integral part of the process and Outlook had NOTHING to do with it, my opinion of their customer support is currently very low.