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kitsune
join:2001-11-26
Sacramento, CA

kitsune to Floid2

Member

to Floid2

Re: SMTP auth issues for Torrington @sbcglobal.net user?

You can usually resolve this problem by changing your dns servers. Not sure why but the issue is that the Mac Mail.app is not getting a response from the smtp server using the default ATT dns servers. I have had success with both Google DNS and Open DNS. I have also heard of ATT providing alternate DNS servers with success.
Floid2
join:2002-02-11
Ridgefield, CT

Floid2

Member

Actually, I did some poking at this, and it seems even AT&T's servers will recurse and toss in A records for what the CNAME for outbound.att.net resolves to - but the little DNS proxy in the Netgear at mom's place won't recurse and only returns the CNAME record. Perhaps official AT&T 2Wires [and most other consumer gateway appliances] have the same issue?

I haven't gotten around to walking mom through overriding DHCP for DNS and knocking at AT&T (or other) servers directly - and I haven't received any mail from her, so clearly she's still out - but I'm guessing that might be it. It's certainly the only 'variable' I can see involving DNS, anyway. [Unless Mail.app is simply ignoring the server handshake in a paranoid way based on the name mismatch due to the DNS alias - which is what it looks like from the logs someone posted elsethread - but then this won't be solved by switching DNS providers...]
Floid2

Floid2

Member

Or, maybe it's "none of the above" per "dshuford" in:

»discussions.apple.com/th ··· tstart=0

... asking her to try that workaround (mail.bellsouth.net, unencrypted, no auth), will post back with the results.

I assume they'll break that once they get outbound.att.net working for Mac Mail.app users, if there's any truth to it at all.

[Edited to clarify that the issue is said to be specific to Mail.app. Haven't tested personally from her machine, but I know everything's fine with other clients used from elsewhere.]