AT&T Portal Madness

At our office, we use AT&T DSL. We also have AT&T phone service, which comes with their "U-Verse" service for voicemail and digital fax. We really like this service because when we get voicemail, we get an email with a .wav file, and digital versions of faxes. Switching to this service also dramatically cut our monthly bill, a nice side effect.

The DSL account is connected to a legacy email address back when AT&T was known as SBC 'round these parts. Anyone with an account with one of these older email addresses probably knows they'll get re-directed to an AT&T portal-like site if they try to type in the domain. Invariably you'll be asked for your email address, and asked to select from a very large list of prevously gobbled-up online services.

Because our DSL was through SBC, they had (and I believe still do) partner with Yahoo! to provide content and other services. Therefore, you should be able to login to some sort of ever-changing Yahoo! type portal with this information. The problem is, I so rarely ever use this information, I can never remember the password*.

My forgetfulness aside, the paths you can take in an attempt to retrieve this password are truly astounding.

A brief illustration:

I wanted to look up some information on Yahoo! Small Business.



Yahoo! tries to help retrieve this info., but we signed up for this account nearly 5 years ago. Not exactly helpful.







Let's go back to the scene of the crime: sbcglobal.net, which re-directs to http://my.att.net







*cue sad trombone*



From the "help article" I end up here:



At this point, I've forgotten what I was going to look up on Yahoo!.

Let's go back out to the Mothership.



Gah! Um. I pick AT&T Account Manager, and am able to login with a different username and password we use to pay our bill. Note this is NOT the same information used to connect to our DSL service. Perhaps I'll find some information on that inside?



"Log in to My AT&T Yahoo! Account" YES! Let's do that! *click*



I'll be over here in the corner, rocking and crying.

Back to the Customer Service list. Clicking "High Speed Internet Support" and following their path leads me back to the "help article."

I was finally able to chat with a very helpful AT&T CSR who was able to reset the password for me.

*Yes, I know; put it in my keychain or something. Thanks Dr. Brainiac.