ATT Broadband Forfeits Mediaone Domain

Kancer was among the many readers to write with news (as carried by the Boston Globe) that "'beginning next month through March 15, current subscribers with (username)@mediaone.net addresses will be required to change them over to an address ending in attbi.com.' Also 'After March 15, any mail sent to a mediaone.net address will be rejected.' What a pain, looks like they are taking down pop mail and replacing it with web-based e-mail as well."

Comments

Never used the mail anyway

[Woodrow]

Enough said. I guess next it will have to be switched to comcast when the purchase goes through. Own your own domain so you don't get screwed!!

Enough said

Chris Woodruff

A Sad Day for ISP services.

[ASyndicate]

No POP Email,
This used to be the whole reason to get an ISP because there were no free POP servers. Great.
I dont want to be looking at web-based email all day.

attbroadband.com as well?

[Rackemup]

anyone with @mediaone.com will have to get a new email address... AND anyone with @attbroadband.com will have to get a new address as well.

What does attbroadband.com have to do with mediaone? Probably nothing, they just said to themselves "well we're going to piss off 100000 subscribers by making them change their email addresses, what's a few thousand more? Then they'll all look the same!"

Cuz we all know how much marketing people like to make everything look pretty =)

ummm...

[jpellino]

if you can't configure via a wizard or mac assistant, you probably can't operate a mouse either.

pop will still work when you're on the cable modem itself - what we want is pop anywhere - so i can stop having to throw a switch every time i want to check all my mail on all my addresses - i have 6 to check between personal and admin respoonsibilities,

i'd like to give out my @home as it's the easiest to give by voice, but now i can't integrate it into a mail client unless i'm playing couch potato.

and for what good reason? certainly none on the customer end - have both - like every mom and pop isp.

Re:I've got a solution

[filtersweep]

Have you been living in a cave?

It IS a big deal when software activation codes, hard disk keys (for copy protected software), all sorts of "account info," etc. are tied to email addresses. I don't exactly trust a forwarding service such as yahoo mail for a more permanent solution. Sure, it is not the end of the world, but it can be a real pain to prove you are who you are to some vendors after your email changes.

It also simply sucks if you have an email address you actually like (rather than epd54346@blahblahblah.com). I went through this whole nightmare when MSN assimilated Qwest customers. I am NOT having a hotmail or MSN account- so I switched to a local ISP out of principle- and that was not without its bumps considering I use DSL and there are few people at Qwest who have a clue what they are talking about (they obviously give tech support from a script). Granted this is a different company, but it is the same set of issues. If you vote with your feet, you still get spanked.

@home @attbi

[ekephart]

This might be a little off topic, but I noticed, when ATT@Home turned into @attbi, both a speed up in service and a drop off in spam/Nimda hits. Anyone who has web logs knows that the average residential user with the pirated win2k server ("Der, I got this here copy of server and I'm gonna run it cuz I done wanna gonna be 31337") probably still has Nimda. Sigh. For about 4 days after the switch I take it these people were on the phone trying to get their machines online again. Some words of advice for you MediaOne customers: Relish those few days. Call in sick to work. Eat plenty of food the few days before so you don't even have to get up during said time.

Oh BTW here is evidence of Nimda living on. Depending on the day you see that log you may even see some CodeRed boxes out there.

Should ISPs provide email forward like USPS?

[Masem]

While email addresses are relatively a dime a dozen, compared to snail mail addresses, the analogy to how to the USPS forwards mail when you move for up to a year would seem to be apt. Particularly since maintaining such forwarding would be incredibly simple (at least, the various unix sendmail variants make it easy; I'd suspect that Exchange is sufficiently simple as well). In this case, they'd only need to set up a single mail server at mediaone.com and attbroadband.com, and redirect addresses appropriately to the attbi.com addresses.

Maybe they could also include before resending a 4-line notice that they should ask the sender to change the reciever's address (whether in a personal mailbox, or updating a server profile). Then after, say, 3 or 6 months, it would be more reasonable to discontinue those addresses.

The only reason I think this can become more important is that as more people turn to online bill paying, they would need sufficient time to be able to point the various collectors' sites to point to the new address, and since some bills are only sent out every 2,3,4 or 6 months, this would allow for most billing cycles to occur once.

Unanswered questions

[maggard]

In its typical way AT&T Broadband has left us more questions then they've given answers.

From my posting on attbroadband.ne.techtalk.general:

1. Will we loose our Usenet?
2. Will we loose the current dial-up roaming service?
3. Will we loose the ability to use an email client while outside ATTBI?
4. Will we loose our "vanity" machine addresses (something.ne.mediaone.net)?
5. Will we loose simple connectivity and be required to use PPoE?
6. Will we loose home networks that have been ignored or tacitly supported by M1/AT&T Broadband?
7. Will we loose Network servers that have been at-your-own-risk, unsupported, and not to create excessive traffic, but *not* forbidden for the former M1 folks?
8. Will we loose the ability to use Virtual Private Networking to/from our homes (vital to many folks working from home)?
9. Will we loose the FrontPage Server Extensions that AT&T Broadband advertises as being in their web package but work only erratically and not at all for months on end (not my taste but some folks have wasted much time on these)?
10. Will we loose the top-notch fast-response world-class knowledgeable and on-top-of-it-all current phone support folks (cycle your cable modem and reboot your PC...)?
11. What about the discussions of Open Access and the ability to select from a pool of ISPs?
12. Can we receive a guarantee of no more lost services and a stable rate for an extended period of time after all of this?

Comcast is doing this too... the solution is...

[mlg9000]

I am a former Mediaone customer. My area was bought out by Comcast and they are changing all our email address too. Comcast just bought ATT too... so guess what might happen to those people... Since being on Comcast they have done the following:

1. Raised prices 20%
2. Eliminated all our email accounts (you can call in 3 weeks to get new ones... gee thanks)
3. Mailed us new cable modems and required us to self install them... then bring the old one back to them. (Not that this is difficult but for some people it might be... and bring the modem to US!!! BTW... the Comcast people were appropriately behind bulletproof glass when I brought the modem back)
4. Eliminated the NNTP server completely!
5. DNS servers switched several times and slowed to a crawl when it didn't timeout. (Because I run Linux and that is not a "client OS" it did not pickup the DNS servers from DHCP... I had to call a friend and have him run nslookup on his Win2k machine)
6. Web performance was in the 56k range and down several hours a day for several weeks while things were being changed over to Comcast... (It's now back)

My solution to all this since there are no other broadband providers in the area was to:

1. Setup a DNS caching server... performance increased 10 fold.
2. Register my own domain at dotster.com ($15 a year) and use zoneedit.com (free DNS!)
3. Use my new dynamic domain to setup my own mail server at home... I paid Zoneedit $11 for the year for email backup in case I was down for some reason. Now I have unlimited email accounts, POP, IMAP.... anything I want!

Re:What about DNS?

[bourne]

I suppose this means that my spiffy old .ne.mediaone.net (I have fought many times to keep it from changing to one of those ugly hXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses) will get changed into some ugly attbi.com address.

Since the hXXXXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses were machine-constant (X == MAC address, and therefore you always had the same name) I just pointed my www and MX records at that name for the first year. Then came the big DHCP/DNS "upgrade" a couple of months ago. DNS was screwed up for a week and a half. I went to DynDNS and haven't looked back. Free to host up to 5 DNS records; $30/lifetime to host 1 domain, and more reliable than AT&T will ever be.

Re:What about DNS?

[Corgha]

Sure, DynDNS is great for some A records and CNAMEs under another domain (in fact I use them), but I'm not talking about that -- no one in his/her right mind would use his/her ISP address as something to hand out to people. Get a domain or subdomain and use that; you can migrate it easily from ISP to ISP.

What I'm talking about is the PTR records and the hopefully-matching A record going the other way. DynDNS can't help you there, because I seriously doubt AT&T is going to delegate your little part of in-addr.arpa to DynDNS.

Some paranoid admins won't allow connections from IPs that don't resolve into names or that resolve into names that don't resolve back into the IP. Rightfully so, I might add, as it only takes a modicum of competence (usually scripting) to ensure that reverse records are correctly set up. I don't want to suddenly lose access to those sites (as some friends on a different subnet have) because AT&T can't get their act together.

Sadly, competence seems to be going out of style. My personal favorites that I've seen lately (they've been portscanning me -- I don't go looking for this stuff):
12.161.192.5 => ip4.wpic.com.192.161.12.IN-ADDR.ARPA
207.252.75.118 => kayne1
Some folks clearly need to learn about $ORIGIN. (75.252.207.in-addr.arpa has turned into a lame server in the past few days, but used to be full of gems; the first one you can verify yourself.)