in reply to Re^3: SMTP authentication misery
in thread SMTP authentication misery

Ah ha! Good questions!

1 Yes, it is DSL service here.

2 I'm not sure what a DSL account id would be (an email address provided by at&t for our DSL account?), but info@826michigan.org is probably what you mean by 'additional email id.'

3 Yes, I did escape the @.

4 No, http://att.yahoo.com/mail does not let me login! Username and password are valid, however, as login is possible via http://webmail.826michigan.org.

A bit of background. 826michigan is a small, educational non-profit. I'm merely a part-time volunteer without a whole lot of technical expertise, though perhaps more than the other liberal arts folks here. My supervisor, who confessed she had no idea what a router was, also had no idea who our ISP was. I had to determine this from a telephone bill, then call at&t for an smtp address. smtp.att.yahoo.com was the address given me by the sbcglobal tech for our DSL account.

Our organization's website and the email addresses associated with it aren't likely hosted by at&t/sbcglobal/yahoo, however. It was setup and is maintained by some guy up in Canada -- just another do-gooder like me. Could therein be the source of my misery? Do I need some sort of 'account id' directly provided by at&t/sbcglobal/yahoo to be recognized and authenticated by same?

Thanks, again and again. -cypress

Be glad, sitting in your gray-walled cubicle, that at least you weren't an English major.

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Re^5: SMTP authentication misery
by gmargo (Hermit) on Nov 25, 2009 at 18:15 UTC

    Good Answers!

    I think I know what's going on now. There are 2 different "internet entities" involved. ATT is your Internet Service Provider, providing connectivity to the Internet. Your web site, http://826michigan.org, is hosted by the website hosting company Dreamhost.

    ATT provides a login id/password, and I believe also "additional email" ids (which I've never used myself so I'm not sure.) If you wish to send outgoing mail through the ATT SMTP server, you'll need that id.

    You can also send mail through your web site hosting company. They have also provided you with a login id/password to manage the web site. And also email accounts of the form "userid@826michigan.org". To send outgoing mail through the Dreamhost SMTP server, try pointing your program at mail.826michigan.org. Be aware that your info@826michigan.org email address may be an alias for another email address.

    I learned a lot about what Dreamhost provides on these pages:

    This ping shows http://826michigan.org being hosted on a Dreamhost machine: 

    gmargo@tesla 899$ ping -c 1 826michigan.org
PING 826michigan.org (69.163.186.21) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from apache2-goo.tirane.dreamhost.com (69.163.186.21): icmp_s
+eq=1 ttl=49 time=28.2 ms

--- 826michigan.org ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 28.293/28.293/28.293/0.000 ms

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