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Is it possible to use TheBat! with an AT&T att.net email account?, Cannot connect to att.net incoming email servers
 
Hello,

I've been using TheBat! for years and am currently using v8.2.4 64-bit on Windows 10.  However, the POP3 connection to my att.net account stopped working some time ago, although the SMTP connection still works fine.  If I specify the incoming mail server as legacy.pop.mail.yahoo.com or pop.mail.yahoo.com (which AT&T used to suggest and which used to work) I get the message "FETCH: Connection to host broken (last commands sent were: "PASS", "STAT").  If I instead set it to inbound.att.net as AT&T currently recommends I get the message "TLS handshake failure. The server host name ("inbound.att.net") does not match the certificate."  When I change to IMAP and use incoming email server imap.mail.att.net I get the similar message "TLS handshake failure. The server host name ("imap.mail.att.net") does not match the certificate."

In a Hail Mary effort I deleted the two certificates TheBat! was using for these servers fr om it's Trusted Root CA address book in hopes that the correct ones would be reloaded when I accessed the mail servers, but it just reloaded the same ones again and the problem remained.  The name of the POP3 certificate it loads is legacy.pop.mail.yahoo.com and for IMAP it is *imap.mail.yahoo.com.

I then tried the same inbound.att.net server in Outlook 2010 as well as another email client I use and it all worked perfectly!  So, it seems to me that either TheBat! is using the wrong certificate or is interpreting its contents incorrectly.  Where are Outlook and my other client application getting the certificates they successfully use for these servers, where are they being stored, and is it possible for me to access them and try them with TheBat! ?  I looked in Outlook to see if there was some way to export certificates but I couldn't find anything that even listed them.

I saw a posting on another site in which the poster said someone from TheBat! support told him to get the correct certificate from the server administrator and install it manually.  However, I talked to AT&T tech support and they said they didn't have the certificates and didn't know wh ere I could get one.  They suggested I call Yahoo since AT&T actually uses Yahoo to handle their email infrastructure but such a call is a virtual impossibility to any bloated outfit like Yahoo, Gmail, etc.  An Internet search for such a certificate turned up nothing but it's got to be available somehow, doesn't it?

So, has anyone actually gotten TheBat! to work with att.net email lately?  If so, how did you do it?  Could this actually be a problem in TheBat! itself?  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ray
Edited: Ray Mitchell - 12 August 2018 13:05:17
 
I would start by upgrading to the latest version of The Bat (assuming your license still covers it). If that alone doesn't help, you can try the "Options | S/Mime and TLS | Microsoft CryptoAPI" setting, which tells The Bat to use Windows' certificate store rather than its own. If that doesn't help either, yes, you'll have to find the root certificate that authenticates the certificate presented by the mailserver, and import it into The Bat's address book.

Note that some certificate conflicts can be caused by antimalware like Kasperski's and Norton's which interfere with the authentication process, so if you're using something like that, it may be a good idea to turn it off while you try to fix this.
I volunteer as a moderator to help keep the forum tidy. I do not work for Ritlabs SRL.
 
Thanks for your suggestions Daniel.  I first tried everything you recommended to no avail. However, after reinstalling my old version of TheBat!, fighting with a few other problems, reinstalling v8.5.8 64-bit, then deleting and reinstalling my accounts in TheBat! itself I was able to get my att.net accounts to work for both IMAP and POP3 as long as I didn't use the inbound servers AT&T recommends for them.  In instead used imap.mail.yahoo.com for IMAP and pop.mail.yahoo.com for POP3.  For some reason this time they worked and will hopefully will continue to do so.  I'm thinking that deleting then reinstalling the accounts in TheBat! was the magic bullet, but I'm just guessing.
Edited: Ray Mitchell - 16 August 2018 23:38:20 (Update)
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