Sunday morning, I opened Outlook on my main PC to see what had come in overnight. To my surprise, there was no new email to my Verizon (AOL) account.
In recent weeks, I’d been experiencing strange email behavior: one associate wasn’t receiving mail sent from the Verizon account and I’d had to use a different address and mail server to get stuff to him. In addition, email intended for me seemed to get lost in cyberspace randomly (not all the time). But now there was a full-blown crisis where nothing at all was coming in or going out—test emails to others weren’t leaving my PC, and their emails to me were not showing up. Outlook reported an assortment of error messages in relation with connecting to the servers.
So I launched a browser to check Verizon webmail (which is now handled by AOL) and, sure enough, there was all my new mail waiting for me. One of them, from early Sunday morning, came from AOL itself, which cryptically informed me that
The security of your AOL account is important to us. In light of reported security issues or suspicious activity on an account, please change your password. [link deleted]
No more details were given, no indication as to the nature of the “security issue” or “suspicious activity”. Contacting AOL customer service was out of the question, as typically their “answer” is to try to upsell you to a higher-tier service; so it was up to me to research and discover what to do about this strange problem.
Over the next day and a half, I tried all the usual recommendations:
- Disabling the Windows firewall
- Disabling the AV software
- Running Outlook in Safe Mode
- Disabling Outlook add-ons
- Running scanpst.exe to fix possible .PST file corruption
- Archiving old emails to decrease the size of the main .PST file
- Changing (as AOL suggested) the password to open the webmail inbox
- I even changed the “app password” that’s now required of Outlook in order to access AOL mail.
None of this made any difference. Then late last night, while continuing to look into this and now weighing the prospect of migrating to a new email address, I chanced on this post on the Verizon community forum:
…I checked my POP3 settings and they were all changed from pop and smtp.verizon.net to pop and smtp.mail.yahoo.com.
Based on this report and using the solution given in that thread, I went into the Outlook settings—and sure enough, my incoming and outgoing servers had been changed to Yahoo without my knowledge or participation! WTF. When I changed them back to Verizon servers, my mail suddenly started flowing again into Outlook.
I did not know that it was possible for an email provider to reach into its users’ mail clients and change settings. Is that what happened here? I can’t imagine what else could have made the change: the PC came up clean on several different malware scans.
Has anybody else experienced this sort of thing with their email provider? Any theories or insights as to what was going on?
As another one who uses Outlook with 2 different verizon.net accounts, I remember when we had to go through the so-called “migration” after Verizon bought AOL (and Yahoo!) plus AOL’s “app password” *&^% because we use Outlook.
