RANT -- AT&T New Yahoo Mail Servers are a Deal 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 at Honey House Web Designs 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
While you had no intentions to abuse it, the system itself with that setup is ripe for abuse.
2. You might want to look into Google Apps for Business for the honeyhousedesigns.com domain. It's essentially gmail.com for your domain and the standard edition is free.
The issue now isn't about authentication. It's about the text entered into the "to/from" lines, which should be irrelevant.
With the authentication, the actual ISP and user information is in the header of the email.
To all, I will be looking into Google Apps, but need to be able to use a local email client. Where I am and using AT&T for connection, they have it set that any emails sent out from any local email clients. Even my current Gmail settings, which are secured and using Google's servers no longer work.... :(
Google Apps syncs with Outlook, which we do not use. We prefer Thunderbird. And we have mail servers for our business, we simply want the email in and out to be branded with out name, not AT&T. I will look into it further, but I think the ISP will still be an unreasonable issue.