HHWD
join:2009-07-06
Aiken, SC
 ·AT&T DSL Service
| New Yahoo mail servers are a dela breaker!
AT&T DSL broadband has been migrating customers to their "new", "improved" mail servers... 3rd party, Yahoo. While Yahoo is a fine company, this move was another terrible step in AT&T's continuing downward spiral of not being in-tuned with their customers.
My business, while growing tremendously, has a home office. I want to be able to send emails with my business email account name, regardless of the ISP I use to connect. Up until my account was migrated, this was easy. AT&T (formerly Bellsouth) used my ISP email account to transparently verify the account as legitimate and allow mail to be sent. My "to", "from" and "reply to"'s could be anything I wanted... honeyhousedesigns.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.
So when a recipient got an email from me, they saw my business email address in the from and reply to fields and could reply through that business account.
NO LONGER! NOW... Any AND EVERY email sent must have my AT&T email address as the from AND the reply to. So, the recipient will receive email branded with AT&T's email address (note, one I don't use at all...ever). If the recipient just hit reply, the email goes to that account, not my business account. And according to AT&T, that is just the way it will be. Tough noogies on me for using a home office with "residential" DSL.
GET THIS THOUGH! For triple the monthly DSL fee I pay now, my DSL can be "upgraded" internally at the office to allow me to have the functionality I want. No line changes, no new installations, just pay them more money and they will come through with the goods. But for how long until the next "gotcha"? Seems more like extortion to me than a "new improved" service.
As a small business, we consider telecommuting and home offices an excellent resource to keeping overhead low and being able to pass that savings along to customers and be able to employ more people. But our business is important enough that we want to brand it with OUR name, not Ma Bell's.
So, we begin the process of finding a provider who will provide us with what we need at a reasonable price. Bye-bye Bell  |
