AT&T and Port 25 - No Mail For You!!!!

    AT&T and Port 25, no mail for you and you and you!!!!!

    So only my 2nd blog post this year and it's my second blog post aboutAT&T.  Don't get me wrong.  I like AT&T, I have almost all of my services through AT&T, home phone, DSL,Satellite TV, Cell Phones and the list goes on.  I have so many AT&T cell phones, and so many different entertainment packages from AT&T that it's normal for my bill to exceed $500 on an average month.   

As much as I like AT&T, no company is perfect, in fact most ISP's and phone company's are far from perfect.  Being in the business that I am in, I have a tendency to see where these company's fail on almost a daily basis.  Recently I was at a customers house trying to set up his Outlook with his business email.  No matter what I tried I couldn't get his SMTP servers to verify and send email. Thinking something might be wrong with his computer I began running the usual gambit of anti virus programs, anti spyware etc... While all that was running I pulled out my trusty Rj SystemsLLC laptop and booted it up.  I wanted to check to see if my own Outlook account could send email from his home, and since I had just used it to send an important document from a McDonald's only an hour earlier I knew it was working just fine.  

When I attempted to send the email I to ran into the same SMTP error.  At this point I knew it wasn't his computer.  That only thing I could think of was that there was some kind of filter in place on his AT&T DSL line that prevented him from using port 25 as his SMTP port.  So I began the long and usually horrible process of contacting AT&T DSL customer support.  Keep in mind that I do this on a regular basis.  I have become so accustomed to hearing people speak with an Indian accent that it almost sounds weird to me when I hear normal English.  

When the AT&T 1st Tier DSL tech came on the phone, I explained to him who I was, my knowledge level of the problem and the conclusion I had come to.  Did that matter?  Hell no, I still had to jump through all the hoops to get to the point where he would even talk to me about the problem.  And 30 minutes later when the hoops had ended we got down to business.  I preceded to tell him about my problem again, and then this time he tells me that under no circumstances does AT&T put any filters or blocks on their lines that would prevent the customer from sending email.  This lead to a bunch more hoops and and after another 45 minutes of me arguing on the phone with a tech who obviously didn't know what was really going on, I was elevated to 2nd tier support.  

 When 2nd tier DSL support got on the line I spent a whole 5 minutes again explaining the problem, who I was, my knowledge level of the problem etc... only to have the 2nd tier DSL tech come back and tell me that AT&T DOES PUT A BLOCK ON PORT 25 TO HELP CURB SPAM.  

What?!?!?!?!?!

“But wait, the other guy said.....that.....but............”

What?!?!?!?!?!

"Yes sir, AT&T block's port 25 to help prevent spam, but I can lift it for you at your request.  Shall I do that now?"

errrrrrrrrrrr "Hell Yes" I said.  And then problem solved.  

Every time I call AT&T it's a whole new learning experience for me. This time I learned that 1st tier DSL support personal in India or Pakistan or wher ever they are don't really know what AT&T is doing behind the scenes here in the States.   AT&T is all about communication but yet that can't communicate to their 1st tier support personal what is really going on.  Ohhh and what's really funny here, when I was at McDonald's before, their WI-FI was provided by AT&T.....hmmmmmmmm.

So if in the future if your trying to set up a POP type email account on the AT&T network, be sure to either work your way through getting port 25 lifted, or see if you can use a different port.  Otherwise it isn't going to happen.