Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
i lost my @home.com address and had to switch to @shaw.ca
i_am_not@home.com is just more funny that i_am_not@haw.ca
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 =)
There'll be POP3, it's just there will now *also* be webmail.
they took away the abilty to use a standard client when not hooked to your actual cable modem - so i can't use mail.app or entourage unless i'm at home.
they will only let you get remote mail via an att web page, so it's no longer integrated into the client with all your other mail..
they claim this is an improvement. in order to let you access mail remotely - which every other tin-horn isp can let you do anyway...
1. half speed since dec 1
2. 11% price jack
3. dns sux
4. dhcp pool sux
5. toy mail
if i'm gonna grab my ankles like this, i at least want a free pair of better looking sneakers.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
right now you have the choice of either. There is no preference at this time.
WebMail is for people who move around and want to check their account from non-attbi network connected computers.
Some people also prefer WebMail to using Outlook Express (the only supported mail client -- although there are instructions on the web for other clients)
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.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Easier mail client to walk the "AOL crowd" through
As long as the mail client is standardized (ie: "We support this mail client, if you want to use another one, that's fine, we'll give you the servernames, but we won't help you with settings, etc...") then it's just as easy to walk someone through it. Heck, most tech support places just use a script they read from anyway - half the time the "tech" is as clueless as the user, at least in "front-line" tech support, where these kinds of queries get handled.
Webmail is less vulnerable to viruses designed for Outlook/Outlook Express
If it's being brosed by IE, it's insecure. Until MS decides to put some sane defaults in IE as to what kinds of scripts it will execute "out-of-the-box", and what kinds of system information and file access those scripts will have, it will be possible to exploit a user's system through any webpage.
Since 90% of their users will be coming in through IE, "added security" is most definitely NOT what they're getting. The Windows Addressbook is accessible through IE's scripting engine. Unless they have people ditch their addressbooks (good luck - I tried to get my parents to ditch theirs a while ago, in favor of a local webpage, in part to save them from being a node for addressbook worms, and they would not give it up. They were that attached to it.) it's not going to help.
What it will do is add a layer of indirection. IE can't be told to respond to a mailto: link by opening up a webmail client - so all those users are going to have to be explained to why clicking on an email link no longer allows them to email the address pointed to.
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.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
If you read the article, the issue behind this is that some other company apparently won the rights to the mediaone.net domain. If ATT doesn't control the domain any more, they can't do any forwarding.
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
From my posting on attbroadband.ne.techtalk.general:
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Incidentally, you can buy domain-based E-mail redirection for about $20 per year. So you can buy your own domain (maybe in .nom) just for forwarding purposes.
Make sure you get DNS MX record redirection, not mail forwarding, so the mail doesn't take an extra step.
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!
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.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.)