Weird Epilogue: Talked to the AT&T Tier Two support people (the competent ones they diligently try to keep you from reaching).
Ultimately, he concluded that for some reason, Thunderbird wasn't recognizing the presence of my username and therefore was internally rejecting my username/password combination. Eventually I correctly guessed why. For some reason, a few years ago another Tier Two rep fixed a connection problem by changing the username in my email client from (myname)@sbcglobal.net, to (myname) %sbcglobal.net. Counterintuitive to me, but it worked with it and it didn't work without it. Now, for whatever reason, it didn't work until it was changed back to "@". Apparently Thunderbird looked for the properly spelled username with @, didn't find it, figured the username was incorrect, and generated the boilerplate error message. At least for the moment, instant fix. Thank you again, Dan, for all your help. The transcript of this discussion speeded the diagnostic process considerably. Gracias, Tony On Oct 14, 11:47 am, Dan <dantear...@gmail.com> wrote: > At 6:17 PM -0700 10/13/2009, tonycd wrote: > > > 2 adsl-99-144-239-254.dsl.emhril.sbcglobal.net (99.144.239.254) > >17.870 ms 16.665 ms 25.795 ms > >[etc] > > Ok.... > > It's not Thunderbird - if the prefs etc were foo, it would be failing > all the time. > > It's not your DNS - that translation (the dig) was good. > > It's not your path to Yahoo's servers - the traceroute is ok. > > That brings us back to the original error message: > > >The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server > >smtp.att.yahoo failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing > >SMTP connections. > > I just hit that SMTP server cluster directly, using telnet. Most of > my attempt succeeded in connecting and getting the server's first > response. But quite a few failed! > > So the problem is Yahoo's server is refusing connections now and > then. This is the type of thing that Yahoo should have noticed and > fixed fairly quickly. but .... sigh. At this point the best thing to > do would be for you to send a message to your ISP. Give them that > error message. Tell them that DNS lookups and a traceroute seems > fine - that the problem is that the server itself is not always > responding. Because this is a contracted/outsourced service, it may > take a while to fix... > > IN the mean time.... You might want to switch to a more reliable > provider. My fav these days is Gmail... > > - Dan. > -- > - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
