at&t email client issues?

W Stewart

So there's a customer at work getting errors in their outlook email client saying that the server refused the connection. They can send and receive mail but this message pops up every two minutes which they say is annoying. Now we're a web hosting company so we can't support their email client for them but we do support their mail server. I was able to verify that the problem isn't the mail server by adding a test account to my thunderbird email client and having a co-worker add the same account to his outlook client. We can send and receive mail fine for extended periods of time without any issues. The customer noted that the only change that was recently made was a switch from verizon fios to at&t.

I've had problems with at&t in the past at previous jobs with them making changes like switching everybody from a public ip to a private ip in the 10.x.x.x range and completely messing up the flow of our clients businesses and their support in general just seems to be a nightmare. I've already recommended to the customer that they switch to another ISP because my past experiences with at&t has told me that they don't meet the standards required of most businesses but I'm just wondering what in particular may be the cause of this mail issue.

I've seen plenty of people on at&t forums having issues using any sort of email client but most of them seem to be using at&t's mail servers. With the issue being intermittent, I'd imagine it probably takes place during some process where the email client checks for new mail and I would guess that it's some sort of issue relaying mail through at&t's servers or something but I'm curious if anyone has any more detail on this process and what may be causing the issue.

ratbuddy

Mail is pretty straightforward, so you can win some easy brownie points with the customer by fixing it up for them.

I'm not clear on the situation. Is the email server hosted with your company, or with AT&T? Have you looked at the logs if it's hosted with you? Have the customer verify the basic settings and turn on Outlook connection logs yet?

W Stewart

Email server is hosted with us. Sorry if that wasn't clear. The customer is trying to connect from their office location but we don't support their office computers or email client programs. we can only offer suggestions or point them in the right direction so long as it doesn't take up a lot of our time. They've turned on logging and only get the same connection refused error with more output showing the attempt to establish a connection. Both myself and a co-worker can connect fine from our own email clients so it doesn't appear to be the email server itself. They've also stated that the issue just started occurring after they switched to at&t. I've asked for their mail settings and tried to get them to re-create the account but they don't seem to be interested in troubleshooting outlook and I don't blame them since the issue is occurring on every computer in their office.

Edit: sorry let me clarify so I don't confuse anyone. This is really an out of scope issue for the company I work for since we've verified that the email server itself isn't the problem. I've already suggested to the customer that they go with another ISP if they have a choice. I'm just wondering if anybody is familiar enough with at&t's network or email routing in general to know what would cause this. Everything that I've found online suggests that at&t's own tech support is pretty useless and that the only real way to resolve this issue is by changing ISPs.

I'm not sure if they're using at&t's uverse service or dsl but if they are using uverse and are stuck behind at&t's private network, I wonder if there's some sort of issue with relaying through at&t's email servers or something.

ratbuddy

So there's nothing in the server logs when they get the failure to connect?

Anyway, if they don't care enough to fix the issue, I don't see why anyone else should

W Stewart

Nothing in the server logs. I'm not gonna get to hung up on it. I've already given them a resolution, I just generally like to have as much detail as I can about something.