outbound SMTP email failing

Could not send outbound aol email at all.  Could receive fine

I don't understand what you are trying to do? 

Do you just want to send mail to an aol email address? 

Are you trying to use the AOL POP/IMAP/SMTP servers for your email clients?

Is that why you need to use port 25?

If the answer to the last two questions is "yes", then I ask why do you want to do that?  What's wrong with using the att/yahoo servers for your email clients?

Thanks for the quick response.

Yes, I am trying to send mail using the AOL SMTP server configuration in my (Mac) clients.

I am unable to do that (get timeout errors on the client).  On other networks (non uverse networks, or using my cell phone as a hot spot), the exact same client configuration works fine, all the time.

This issue ONLY started when I installed uVerse.

I am not an expert on email configuration, so I have additional Qs:

- Are you saying I should change the SMTP server address to be "outbound.att.net" in my Mac mail client?

- Can I use that server even if I am sending the email from an AOL address?

- Will there be any issue if I use that server when I am NOT on the AT&T (uverse) network?

thanks again,

- Are you saying I should change the SMTP server address to be "outbound.att.net" in my Mac mail client?

I'm saying you should be able to configure you email client to use the att/yahoo servers for both sending and receiving using the specified server settings, i.e.,

For POP:

    inbound.att.net/995/ssl/password authentication
    outbound.att.net/465/ssl/password authentication

For IMAP:

    imap.mail.att.net/993/ssl/password authentication
    smtp.mail.att.net/465/ssl/password authentication

You mentioned "outbound.att.net".  But your post also stated you have multiple email client apps - (Mac) clients and a cell phone.  But outbound.att.net is the smtp server for POP.  With multiple email clients I assume you want to use IMAP to keep all those email clients in sync.  Indeed most email clients default to IMAP when you are defining their configuration (Mac Mail does and I assume your phone does also).  So maybe your send problem is as simple as just specifying the IMAP settings where the smtp server is smtp.mail.att.net. on port 465 with ssl and password.

- Can I use that server even if I am sending the email from an AOL address?

Are trying to use an AOL address just to preserve that old AOL email address?  Most email client apps have two areas in their configurations.  One is the server settings.  The other is identification settings, i.e., what a recipient sees as the sender.  If the sender info is not specified it defaults to being the same as the server settings name and email address.  If you set the id info however that is the name and email address the recipient will see as the sender (From:).  So you could always specify your old AOL address there and fix up your AOL account to forward received email to your att account.  That or just set up your clients for both AOL and att, i.e., two email accounts.  There's all sorts of flexibility here.

- Will there be any issue if I use that server when I am NOT on the AT&T (uverse) network?

Why not?  Servers don't care where you access them from?  It's the account info they use to verify a user.  With respect to your problem using the AOL servers instead of ATT's, you said you are having problem sending.  Could it be that you set your client's configuration to use AOL's POP smtp server and like the att/yahoo servers it uses a different server for IMAP?  Maybe that's your sending problem going through AOL.  Specify the AOL IMAP smtp server.

Frankly I would just use the more secure ssl att/yahoo servers instead of AOL.