Well, I spent over three (3) hours last night trying to get my in-laws’ email working again.  Short background…my in-laws have sbcglobal (AT&T) as their DSL provider.  They also have their own domain for email.  They use Outlook Express for their domain email account.

They informed me that for the last four months, they were getting emails, but couldn’t send any…always came up with an error asking for a password.  Now, since I am a computer geek and live only one mile away, I’m not sure why they let it go for 4 months…but I digress…

The problem seemed to be that AT&T doesn’t like anyone else’s SMTP server, so you have to use their’s for your outgoing email server.  The problem here is that they (my in-laws) didn’t know their sbcglobal email address or it’s password.  I finally called and got their email address, and reset their password.  However, the password didn’t work.  I then tried on-line to reset the password (twice), each time being told that it worked, but still unable to log into their account.  Frustration is starting to run a bit high…

I then called AT&T again, worked with a tech, who also tried the passwords I had reset, then tried resetting it, all to no avail.  I got escalated and started working with the ‘manager’.  After several remote sessions, she finally got the password set.  Then when trying to send an email, we got another error message.  Now, it was saying that the sending address was invalid.  Apparently, you have to ‘validate’ any email addresses that are used, and somehow my in-laws’ email address had been entered improperly…which is very interesting, since they would not know how, and I would spell it right…so not sure how it came about…but we corrected the spelling and thought we were home free.   However, the problem remained…even though we ‘validated’ the address three times, and three times were told it was successful.  The problem?  In Outlook Express, there were three capital letters in the email address, and when I typed in the email address in AT&T verification, I used all lowercase.  Case never matters in email addresses…and I even received the response from AT&T to verify my validation, so obviously the email address worked.  However, when we changed the address to all lower case in Outlook Express, everything worked fine.  AARRRGGG!  Three and a half hours, 2 remote sessions, 3 techs, and one diet cherry Dr. Pepper later, all was well.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to send email out through Outlook or Outlook Express from your own email account using SBC/AT&T/Yahoo DSL

In the Account setup area of Outlook:

• Set SMTP server to smtp.sbcglobal.net (at least for us)
• Choose ‘My outgoing server requires authentication’
• Enter your SBCGlobal/AT&T/Yahoo sign in info
• On the advanced tab set the SMTP port to 465 (may be different for you)
• Choose SSL

Now, in your AT&T/Yahoo mail account, go to the Mail Options, choose Accounts, and add your email address.  Make sure you enter it EXACTLY as it is entered in your Outlook account setup–spelling and case are critical!   You will then receive a verification email that you click on the verify link button, and you should be all set. 

Hopefully this will help you avoid the frustrations I faced until 11:20 PM last night!