AT&T Accidentally Spams Everyone To Figure Out Non-Spamming Servers... Twice

from the oops dept

There was some buzz this morning about how AT&T was asking their partners and customers to send in a list of all outbound mail servers they use so that AT&T could whitelist them. The emails pretty clearly state that any email coming from a server not in the list would be blocked - which seems like a pretty harsh penalty. Who knew that (a) you needed to be a partner/customer of AT&T to contact them and (b) that you needed to register your mail server with them before they would let your email through? Clearly, people reacted with concern to this request, and the second note (linked above) has the folks at AT&T saying that this isn't a mistake or a joke and they're really, really serious. That is, of course, until their bosses found out, and now AT&T is retracting the notices, they don't need your outgoing SMTP address and it was all a big human error.
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