Updated February 18, 2012
Make an ATT Outlook 2010 Connection to Save Time and Energy
Making the ATT Outlook 2010 connection (working with your ATT mail in Outlook 2010) makes a lot of sense. Instead of having to get some mail in Outlook and the rest through your ATT mail web interface, with the ATT Outlook 2010 connection set up properly, you can work with all your mail in Outlook, and never have to go to your ATT mail website again.
How to Make the ATT Outlook 2010 Connection
In the next few minutes, you will configure your ATT email account and Outlook 2010 to let you send and receive ATT mail from Outlook. This ATT Outlook 2010 connection works really well, unless you need to have access to your ATT email when you are not using Outlook. Let me explain.
As part of the process for setting up an ATT Outlook 2010 connection, you will tell the ATT mail servers not to keep copies of messages once Outlook downloads them. This means that messages will not be visible from the ATT Web interface once you read them with Outlook. This is most likely the way you want things to work anyway (having multiple versions of a message floating around is a recipe for confusion), but is something to be aware of.
With that out of the way, here’s how you make your ATT Outlook 2010 connection:
- In the Outlook main window, click File, then Info, then Add Account. This opens the Auto Account Setup screen.
- Set the Manually configure server settings or additional server types checkbox and click Next to go to the Choose Service screen.
- Select Internet E-mail, then click Next to go to the Internet E-mail Settings screen.
- Enter your name as you want it to appear in messages in the Your Name field.
- Enter your full ATT mail address ([email protected]) in the E-mail Address field.
- Select POP3 in the Account Type list.
- In the Incoming mail server (POP3) field, enter pop.att.yahoo.com and in the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) field, enter smtp.att.yahoo.com.
- Enter your full ATT mail email address (including the att.net) in the User Name field.
- Enter your ATT email password in the Password field.
- Set the Remember password checkbox if you don’t want to have to enter your password manually each time Outlook 2010 checks your mail (believe me, you’ll get tired of doing that real quick).
- Make sure that the checkbox next to Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA) is CLEARED.
- Under the “Deliver new messages to” heading, select New Outlook Data File to store your ATT mail messages separately from your other messages. The messages will appear in the Inbox with all the rest of your mail, but won’t be stored with your other (corporate?) messages on the server.
- Click More Settings to open the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box.
- Click the Outgoing Server tab.
- Set the My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication checkbox.
- Select Use same settings as my incoming mail server.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- Clear the Leave a copy of messages on the server checkbox.
- Enter 995 in the Incoming server (POP3) box.
- Set the This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL) checkbox under Incoming server (POP3).
- Enter 465 in the Outgoing server (SMTP) box.
- Select SSL in the “Use the following type of encrypted connection” box under Outgoing server (SMTP).
- Click OK to return to the Internet E-mail Settings screen.
- Click Test Account Settings. The Test Account Settings dialog box appears and Outlook sends a test message using the settings you have just entered. If the test was successful, a Congratulations! message appears in the dialog box. Click Close to close this dialog box. If you didn’t see the Congratulations! message, go back through this procedure from the top to check all your settings.
- Click Next, then Finish.
NOTE: If the test shows that you can receive messages fine, but you can’t send them, I suggest you try the change below. It helped at least one user (thanks for passing this along Krista!) get her connection to send as well as receive after initially failing to send messages.
What to Try If the Regular ATT Outlook Setup Won’t Send Mail
Here is a settings change you can make if you can receive mail but not send it. This change should get the sending side of the equation working properly.
- In the Outlook main window, click File, then Info, then Account Settings. In the menu that appears, click Account Settings. This opens the “Account Settings” dialog box.
- Click the E-mail tab and then select your ATT account from among the list of accounts that appears.
- Click the Change icon which appears above the list of accounts. This opens the “Change Account” dialog box.
- In the Incoming mail server (POP3) field, enter inbound.att.net and in the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) field, enter outbound.att.net.
- Click Test Account Settings. The Test Account Settings dialog box appears and Outlook sends a test message using the settings you have just entered. If the test was successful, a Congratulations! message appears in the dialog box. Click Close to close this dialog box. If you didn’t see the Congratulations! message, go back through this procedure from the top to check all your settings. Don’t give up just yet.
- Click Next until you see the Finish button, then click that.
That still didn’t fix the problem? Then the snag is probably caused by factors outside the ATT Outlook 2010 connection you just set up. I’ve posted instructions for troubleshooting that kind of problem on the Can’t Send Email page.
Your ATT Outlook 2010 connection is now ready to go and your ATT email will start showing up in the Outlook 2010 Inbox soon.
From here you can:
Return to the top of this ATT Outlook 2010 configuration page.
Go to the main Outlook 2010 email accounts page.
Go to the Outlook 2010 home page.
Find More Info…
Related posts:
Laurel,
Can you give me more information on how it is failing to work? We may be able to get you going (or at least figure out what’s going on).
–Bill
I am trying to set up my att.net email to Outlook 2010 on a second computer so that I can access my email while not at home. Is it possible to do this on more than one computer? It works fine on my primary laptop but on the second one it doesn’t work at all (well, it did work briefly and then it stopped.
Tsutomu,
Thank you very much for this information. I’m sure it will help other ATT mail users to get connected to Outlook.
–Bill
Bill,
Go to att.com, then click “myAT&T”, and login using the main email address and password. Under Internet, click dropdown menu, select “Create or Manage a sub account”, then click “Add a sub account” to create sub accounts.
Once the sub account is created, it works with;
inbound.att.net
outbound.att.net
or
pop.att.yahoo.com
smtp.att.yahoo.com
or
pop.mail.yahoo.com
smtp.mail.yahoo.com
using the port settings of
995 ssl
465 ssl
Hope this will help.
Tsutomu
Tsutomu,
Ok. I didn’t realize this was a sub account. I have heard of people having problems with accounts (sub accounts) they set up themselves and needing ATT’s help to get them connected. Good luck and let us know if ATT fixes this for you. I’m sure other people are seeing the same issue.
–Bill
Bill,
I have read other suggestions that you have. None has worked. I have set up the main email account with AT&T when I subscribed the AT&T DSL service. This main email account works fine. After establishing this, I created my own email account, sub account, which is not working. I think that AT&T has not activated my sub email account on the smtp server, thus it does not know or can not verify my sub email account ID and password. I need to call the AT&T tech support, and expalin and ask them to activate my account.
Tsutomu,
I’m not sure why this isn’t working for you. I suggest you go to this page: http://living-with-outlook-2010.com/emailaccounts/2011/02/cant-send-email/ and follow the “I can’t send email” troubleshooting tips I’ve posted there. Hopefully one of them will get you going.
–Bill
My OS is windows 7, and I have tried both settings mentioned here. However they have not worked. I even tried pop.mail.yahoo.com and smtp.mail.yahoo.com since I found this suggestion somewhere on the Internet. But it did not work either. I tried to set it up through a different ISP, wireless and wired connections. I still can not get Outlook 2010 to access the AT&T’s smtp server. I can receive emails, but can not send.
Any other suggestions?
Christy,
That’s great! Thank you for your kind words and thank you for sharing this information with the group.
–Bill
Bill,
That was the answer! I thought I had tried that pop and smtp configuration yesterday. Thank you so much! And I was able to leave emails on the server as well. I wish I had discovered you yesterday before I had to spend 6 or 7 hours before I found your site.
You rock!
Christy
Christie,
There have been reports of this problem recently from several ATT users. I don’t have a good solution for you, but did see that one person recently solved the problem by switching to the regular Yahoo mail server settings instead of the ones ATT says to use. If you want to try that, they are:
Incoming Mail Server: pop.mail.yahoo.com
Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
If you decide to try this, please let us know how it works for you. I’m sure others here would appreciate it!
–Bill
I had free att.net email with ATT/Yahoo and just upgraded yesterday (1-6-12) to Yahoo! Mail Plus. I have had the problem of receiving but not being able to send. I, too, get the screen asking me to verify my email address and pw. I spent 5 hours yesterday trying to get help from Yahoo! and AT&T, to no avail. I found your site today and have tried the different suggestions for incoming/outgoing, and I’m still having problems. I want to KEEP emails on the server. I’ve had computer crashes and have been able to recover emails by having them still on the server. Is this the problem, or is it that I have an att.net email with Yahoo! Mail Plus? I changed to att.net free email because I was moving and didn’t know what my ISP would be in the new location. However, I am so frustrated and angry with the lack of customer care with Yahoo! and AT&T that I about ready to cancel my Yahoo! Mail Plus and go to something like gmail.
Brian,
I’m seeing that this is an intermittent problem for ATT mail users. I don’t have a good set of specific steps for Outlook 2010, but here’s a link that was posted for Outlook 2007 users on the ATT boards. You might want to try the settings they recommend in it and see if they fix the problem. If so, please let us know since this appears to be a long-term issue with ATT.
Thanks,
–Bill
I tried everthing that the att site had on how to set up outlook and all the suggestions here and it still doesnt work..when I run the connection test I pass the incoming server test ok but when it tries the outgoing server it keep propmtin g me for a user name and password. I have to cancel to get out and I can never send emails..
Brian
Kevin Barnes…
Great, thanks for sharing this blog article.Thanks Again. Really Cool….
Thanks for the information. The att website did not give the settings for 2010, I am finally able to get my email in Outlook.
Outlook won’t open at all, even from the Start menu? Have you ever been able to run Outlook on this machine? It is possible that you are looking at a trial version that has timed out.
I cannot get my outlook to open to try and set up 2010 outlook can i open it manually somehow. i have windows seven
[...] configuration instructions for att.net with screenshots here: http://living-with-outlook-2010.com/…-outlook-2010/ BTW I would recommend that you remove the non working account from Outlook [...]
Krista,
Thanks for passing along this information. I’ve updated the page.
–Bill
I tried your directions but could not send email. So I went on att.com.
The website said to do this:
Note: This step should fix most email problems.
Email Program Settings Field:
Enter:
Incoming (POP)
inbound.att.net
Outgoing server (SMTP)
outbound.att.net
(requires authentication)
Incoming mail server:
POP3
Incoming/Outgoing
User Name: Full AT&T email address, including domain
(e.g., [email protected], [email protected])
Incoming mail port #:
995, secure connection (SSL) checked
Outgoing mail port #:
465, secure connection (SSL) checked
Important: While verifying your settings, make sure you entered your email address and password correctly