T-Online e-mail settings and configuration - Germany

We got T-Online internet service at our apartment. When it was activated, I hooked up a secure wireless network for our--my wife and I--laptops. Fine so far. I made an @t-online.de email address for myself and one for my wife. We each have other email addresses as well. I set up our mail clients to download our respective mail. I want to emphasize that I did not put her email addresses in my laptop and vice versa. Well, here comes the bizarre part. All mail to any of our addresses in either of our computers comes into both our computers. In doing so, ALL the "To" fields get converted to my t-online email address, no matter what address the sender had typed in. Plus if someone hooks into our network, all our mail is immediately downloaded into his/her email program in spite of the fact that the new computer's email client has none of our server settings. I have called t-online numerous times to no avail. Has anyone experienced something like this, and if so, how did you solve it?

How silly, Tie-ing your mail adress to your ISP..

Welcome to the wonderful world of Telekom and T-Offline..

Have fun waiting on there .12 a min support line

Don't bother calling the lazy bastards, go down to the nearest T-Punkt and refuse to leave until they have sorted it out. Sometimes they can be very fast, see this Our T-Online is currently offline.

Nothing to sort out, and lazy they are not (but busy maybe). Read the terms and conditions of your T-Online account. You have ONE T-Online mailbox and can have up to 5 Pseudonyms. These pseudonyms share the same T-Online mailbox so incoming mail to any pseudonym goes to the same single place. (as you discovered). If you want additional T-Online mailboxes which are independant of each other, you can have them, but they cost €1.99/month per mailbox - you can order these online inside your own account.

YL6

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, it's not any help. It doesn't explain why all our incoming mail, regardless of which address it is addressed to--even non-T-online addresses--is downloaded into any computer on the network, including ones that haven't been set up to receive our mail. We don't even designate T-online as our incoming server. Mail programs are coded to request specific addresses and to submit proper passwords, etc., in order to download mail from specific servers. T-online has somehow bolixed up this simple arrangement and there seems to be no solution.

Also, it doesn't explain why all the incoming "To" addresses are converted to my t-online address.

Try setting up password protection to stop automatic T-Online mailbox recognition.

Been there, done that. Now, listen carefully:

Your wireless router can connect to T-online for both of you. In the router parameters, set "internet connection type" to "PPPoE". Set username to "AAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTT#MMMM@t-online.de" where "AAA..." is yout Anschlusskennung, "TTT..." is your t-online number, and "MMMM" is 0001. Set "password" to your Zugangskennwort. Also set "keep alive".

Your email programs need to use a different server than before:

mail in: use "pop.t-online.de" on port 110, username="TTTTTTTTTTTT-0001" or "TTTTTTTTTTTT-002"

mail out: use "mailto.t-online.de" on port 25, username="TTTTTTTTTTTT-0001" on both.

Violá.

The lovely thing about this is you can throw all your t-online software away!

Unfortunately I didn't get it quite right!!! Try again:-

Your wireless router can connect to T-online for both of you. In the router parameters, set "internet connection type" to "PPPoE". Set username to "AAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTT#MMMM@t-online.de" where "AAA..." is your Anschlusskennung, "TTT..." is your t-online number, and "MMMM" is 0001. Set "password" to your Zugangskennwort. Also set "keep alive".

Your email programs need to use a different server than before:

mail in: use "pop-mail.t-online.de" on port 110, username="TTTTTTTTTTTT-0001" or "TTTTTTTTTTTT-0002"

mail out: use "mailto.t-online.de" on port 25, username="TTTTTTTTTTTT-0001" or "TTTTTTTTTTTT-0002"

For the 0002 user, you will have to set a password on the server: go to the t-online site and follow links to Service" - "Mitbenutzer" - "Verwalten".

Violá.

The lovely thing about this is you can throw all your t-online software away!

I can't imagine any other way to configure his router, and presume that is already setup (either explicitly as you describe, or implicitly using the generic configuration available in most TCom/T-Online supplied routers). It was also my assumption that the T-Online software was not being used in any case as he refers to "Mail clients" - T-Online software is more bloatware than a simple mail client. If either or both of these are true then your suggestion falls flat...

Sorry if I offended you in some way! I tried to give a full answer, based on my own experience, because what you wrote was not the answer. Setting password protection does not in itself stop automatic mailbox recognition: automatic recognition is stopped by changing to the popmail (or pop-mail) server instead of the pop server. Not everybody knows that! And I don't think my suggestion will "fall flat". I made no assumption about using t-online software - my advice to change servers is necessary whatever email client is used. Personally I/we use Thunderbird. I agree with you about "bloatware" - ditching all t-online software was the best thing that ever happened to my computer.

Thanks for all the Hinweise. I will try them when I return home tonight. By the way, I should have mentioned the hardware. I am using Apple Airport Extreme for the wireless network. Between the wall and the Airport Base Station is a non-wireless Netgear Router. This is an anomaly as the Base Station is also a router, but for some komisch reason here in Germany, my Base Station-which routes perfectly in America--needs to have the signal flow through an independent router before it can route here in Germany. No one at Apple knows why; others have had the same experience. In any case, it works quite well now. The email client I'm using is Apple Mail 2.05, which is the latest version. Incidentally, two years ago when my wife and I were last living in Munich, we had the exact same hardware and software configuration with Tiscali as our ISP and none of these problems occurred.

You won't have had the problem with Tiscali because they require authentication on their pop server to read mail. In its default form T-Online don't need that. Simply being logged in over the line using your T-Online account is all the authentication they need, so they assume that any pop access on port 110 is for them, hence all clients in your home network read the same mailbox, irrespective of the settings. Switch on POP3 identification in your account and the problem should go away...

YL6

... which happens when you use popmail instead of pop as the mail-in server. See here.

sigh... except that popmail requires special registration...