Yahoo taking over MX for ATT domains


Yahoo Mail has long been the webmail destination for mail sent to the AT&T consumer mailbox domains. Meaning that if you had an AT&T email account, you used Yahoo Mail to read any email messages received.

But, for a long time, the actual MX record for those domains pointed to specific AT&T servers, not directly to Yahoo Mail's inbound email infrastructure. AT&T maintained their own inbound MTA gateway servers, and that included applying their own spam filtering rejections to inbound email messages to AT&T email users, potentially above and beyond -- or at least slightly differently than -- what Yahoo Mail itself applied.

This was a common point of confusion for email senders. Are AT&T's consumer mailboxes part of the Yahoo Mail ecosystem? Previously, the answer was "sort of," but going forward, that answer changes to, "yes, AT&T consumer mail domains are Yahoo Mail email domains." Or will be, coming very soon. While announced just a couple of days ago on the Yahoo/AOL Postmaster blog, this is still a transition in progress. As I check on Friday, June 27th, the NV Bell domain has moved its MX record to Yahoo, but for the other domains, their MX records still point to Prodigy (AT&T) infrastructure.

Stay tuned; I have no reason to doubt that these domains will very quickly transition to having mailboxes fully hosted by Yahoo Mail infrastructure, including having MX records pointing to the usual yahoodns.net infrastructure, just like for other branded ISPs they host mail for, like Verizon and Cox.

Which domains are/will be affected by this change? Affected domains are: ameritech.net, att.net, bellsouth.net, currently.com, flash.net, nvbell.net, pacbell.net, prodigy.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net, swbell.net, wans.net, and worldnet.att.net.

This likely will mean that those senders who have had found their mail to AT&T subscribers being rejected with AT&T-specific error messages will no longer need to email that one specific AT&T abuse_rbl mailbox and hope for a reply; future rejections will need to be resolved starting from the Yahoo Senders Hub website, and the SMTP error messages will no doubt reflect that change.

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