For a few weeks last year, a very crudely drawn thermometer labeled “SBCGlobal Pizza Party” could be found in bright orange dry-erase on the back office whiteboard. This impromptu incentive program was a direct response to the regular visits we would get from patrons having trouble with their SBCGlobal email addresses and, yes, we did eventually reach our pepperoni inspired goal. To be fair, the majority of these issues were not directly caused by the sbcglobal.net email service or the services through which SBCGlobal accounts are currently supported/accessed (AT&T and Yahoo, respectively). In most cases it was people with iPhones coming in with the complaint they had suddenly stopped getting their emails; not realizing that the mail app had signed them out after just enough time had passed for them to have forgotten their password. While it was typically an easy fix, we still picked up the habit of gently suggesting a switch to Outlook or Gmail; although dumping the email handle they’ve been using 20+ years is not something most patrons are apt to consider. So is it really worth it? Is SBCGlobal really that bad? Well, here are at least a few things to consider.
Hot Potato Authentication
Does having an email address that ends in @sbcglobal.net mean that you have an email account through SBCGlobal, AT&T or Yahoo? Yes, and that’s confusing for a lot of people.
Nowadays, owners of @att.net, @sbcglobal.net and other AT&T legacy accounts can access their emails by visiting AT&T’s new hybrid homepage at currently.att.yahoo.com. From there, they will be immediately redirected to a login page hosted by att.com (which is different from att.net) when they try to sign in. Upon successful sign in, they will be re-redirected back to the Yahoo mail app hosted by currently.com (formerly att.net). The process involves multiple steps across multiple platforms
How did this get so complicated?
If you have an SBCGlobal email address, you most likely acquired it sometime after the year 2000 when you first enrolled in internet service through the “SBC Global Network”; and the year 2005 when SBCGlobal purchased its former parent company: AT&T. At the point of the merger, SBCGlobal would officially change its name to AT&T Inc. and new SBCGlobal email addresses could no longer be created. Although att.net would continue to support existing sbcglobal.net email addresses, it would not provide its own email service. Instead, it would partner with Yahoo.com In 2008 as the email service provider for att.net and all of its legacy accounts (sbcglobal.net, ameritech.net, etc.). From then on, owners of an SBCGlobal email address could use it to login to the Yahoo.com mail app when they wanted to check their messages. That was, at least, until 2017 when the original contract dissolved; and, while Yahoo would still be the email service provider for all att.net[+legacy] accounts, sbcglobal.net users could no longer access any Yahoo.com applications with their account.
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