Several years ago I started having trouble with my connection to the SMTP server provided by AT&T. What was happening was that when I would try to send mail, 50-70% of the time the connection would time out and the mail would not get sent. What I eventually figured out was that AT&T must have downsized their SMTP servers and they were all busy. This seemed evident because the problem was always worse at times of day, and days of the week, when internet traffic should be higher.
I tried both the old (smtp.att.yahoo.com) and the new servers (outbound.att.net), and got the same result with both. I double-checked my SMTP configurations to make sure that they were correct according to the AT&T instructions, and found no problems there, and, since my setups worked perfectly a small fraction of the time, it seemed like the port and login settings must be good.
After a couple years of this frustration, I gave up and looked for alternate ways to deal with this. I ended up finding a company that basically sold SMTP services: AuthSMTP.com. I contacted them and, IIRC, they had a 1 month trial period that allowed me to check their service before making a longer term commitment. Their service has been flawless for over 2 years now, and I pay US$32 per year, their cheapest plan, to avoid the problems I had with AT&T. I probably send a few hundred emails a month, but they have more expensive plans for people or companies that send more. For me, this has been a cheap and effective solution.
I have no connection to AuthSMTP.com other than being a satisfied customer. I wish I could say the same about AT&T.
Part of my problem was a Pegasus problem, because when my messages weren't accepted by the AT&T SMTP server, Pegasus thought they were, presumably because the problem occurred at a point into the handshaking process where it should have been fine. As it actually happened, my only option was to find each message in my sent mail, choose to forward it to the original sender, reformat it to remove the forwarding bits, and queue it for resending. This was a HUGE burden if there were 5-10 messages to go thru, and it might all get repeated if the SMTP connection failed again, which it often did. Sometimes I would have to go thru this 2-3 times.
So, I'm really happy with AuthSMTP, but this does highlight a couple problems with Pegasus:
1) Under certain circumstances, Pegasus will think that messages have been successfully sent when they really haven't, even though the connection error window had popped up during the connection attempt.
2) Forwarded messages don't appear in the Queue Manager window. They are there, but they don't appear. If I close the Queue Manager window and reopen it, I believe they show up. Yes, this problem still exists under Pegasus version 4.72.572.
I hope this info is useful to someone.
<p>Several years ago I started having trouble with my connection to the SMTP server provided by AT&amp;T. What was happening was that when I would try to send mail, 50-70% of the time the connection would time out and the mail would not get sent. What I eventually figured out was that AT&amp;T must have downsized their SMTP servers and they were all busy. This seemed evident because the problem was always worse at times of day, and days of the week, when internet traffic should be higher.</p><p>I tried both the old (smtp.att.yahoo.com) and the new servers (outbound.att.net), and got the same result with both. I double-checked my SMTP configurations to make sure that they were correct according to the AT&amp;T instructions, and found no problems there, and, since my setups worked perfectly a small fraction of the time, it seemed like the port and login settings must be good.</p><p>After a couple years of this frustration, I gave up and looked for alternate ways to deal with this. I ended up finding a company that basically sold SMTP services: AuthSMTP.com. I contacted them and, IIRC, they had a 1 month trial period that allowed me to check their service before making a longer term commitment. Their service has been flawless for over 2 years now, and I pay US$32 per year, their cheapest plan, to avoid the problems I had with AT&amp;T. I probably send a few hundred emails a month, but they have more expensive plans for people or companies that send more. For me, this has been a cheap and effective solution.</p><p>I have no connection to AuthSMTP.com other than being a satisfied customer. I wish I could say the same about AT&amp;T.
</p><p>Part of my problem was a Pegasus problem, because when my messages weren't accepted by the AT&amp;T SMTP server, Pegasus thought they were, presumably because the problem occurred at a point into the handshaking process where it should have been fine. As it actually happened, my only option was to find each message in my sent mail, choose to forward it to the original sender, reformat it to remove the forwarding bits, and queue it for resending. This was a <b>HUGE</b> burden if there were 5-10 messages to go thru, and it might all get repeated if the SMTP connection failed again, which it often did. Sometimes I would have to go thru this 2-3 times.
</p><p>So, I'm really happy with AuthSMTP, but this does highlight a couple problems with Pegasus:</p><p>1) Under certain circumstances, Pegasus will think that messages have been successfully sent when they really haven't, even though the connection error window had popped up during the connection attempt.</p><p>2) Forwarded messages don't appear in the Queue Manager window. They are there, but they don't appear. If I close the Queue Manager window and reopen it, I believe they show up. Yes, this problem still exists under Pegasus version 4.72.572.</p><p>I hope this info is useful to someone.</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
