[mdlug] AT&T Email Invalid User/Password

[Aaron Kulkis]

Peter Bart wrote:
> Good Morning,
> 	I have AT&T as my DSL provider at home and have an @sbcglobal.net email
> that shares the same password as my domain that AT&T is hosting. The
> password sharing is their idea, not mine. Under that main account I have
> several sub accounts. Lately, I have been getting the invalid
> user/password error accessing my main account and the domain email
> account. All the sub accounts are able to retrieve their email with the
> same email clients, Evolution and Claws. I have had the passwords reset,
> then changed by myself several times. That's getting to be serious pita,
> because I have several devices that retrieve email and the modem shares
> the main account password as well. Once again, their idea. I think I've
> narrowed it down to me having more than one email client/device trying
> to access the same email account at once. Tech support is trying to sell
> me the "it's a feature not a bug" idea. I'm not buying.

I agree with there.  The whole purpose of TCP/IP is to allow different
processes on the same computer to continue communication with a remote
processes simultaneously (i.e. packetized data to/from multiple processes
vs non-packetized data to/from one process at each end).

> I've more or
> less retired my main email account, using it only one one machine and
> only to manage the sub accounts. That's been replaced with a sub
> account. That works for me. But even trying to access
> @petertheplumber.net from multiple devices; at the same time; creates
> this error.
> 	Before I simply move my domain away from AT&T; where it's parked; to
> solve this problem, has anyone else had this problem?

one word: gmail
It will solve all of your e-mail problems.
both POP and (the far superior) IMAP services are free.  Seamonkey,
as well as other clients can support connections to multiple IMAP
accounts simultaneously, and you can even drag-and-drop email from
one IMAP account to another.

Best of all..you can change ISPs at will while keeping your same
Gmail account.


Also, in my experience in 2 years of use -- gmail's spam filtering
is excellant.  The best I've seen before gmail is the Bayesian
filtering in Seamonkey, which had a LOT of false-positives and
even more false-negatives.  I had to comb through my spam
cache every day to retrieve false-positives, typically catching
at least 1/week.

With Gmail, I've had exactly 1 false-positive in 2 years, and
false-negatives are under 10/day.

As a bonus, you can even set up a gmail account fetch from another
POP account.  This means you can convert to gmail IMMEDIATELY
(as in, RIGHT NOW!), and go about notifying your business
contacts and others at whatever pace and timing is most
convenient for you, while NOT having to remember to check
both sets of accounts (gmail address and att.net addresses).

And once all of your contacts are migrated over to addressing
your gmail accounts directly....if in the future, you decide
to move to some other service, gmail accounts can also be set
to silently forward the mail to other email addresses.

Last but not least, on the rare occasions when I log into
my gmail accounts from a web page, my total available storage
space is always higher than it was before.  Back in 2007, a
free Gmail account was around 5000 MB (5 GB).  Right this moment,
as I have logged in to verify the fetch and forward
capabilities that Gmail has, I see that the disk allotment
for each account is now 7397 MB.  Im sure that next week,
it will be a dozen megabytes more.

On my most heavily used acccount, one on which I am subscribed
to about 30 different Yahoo groups, some of which have dozens
of messages per day (including one which allows attachments
and HTML posting privileges, both of which are heavily ABUSED
by a couple morons -- such that this group is taking up more
disk space than all other groups combined, I've only consumed
12% of my allotted space.  If that group were on it's own
account, it would probably take about 7% of an account and
the other  30-ish yahoo groups' email PLUS personal mail
sent to that account is only 5% of alloted consumption.

Of course, your mileage may vary. :-/