So maybe I found the fatal flaw to my DSL

So about about 2-2 1/2 years ago or so I swapped from Charter Cable to AT&T/Yahoo DSL. I had used Charter for around 5 years and it always had reliability problems. At times it would go out every day, multiple times, and always at the worst times. Sometimes it would go out for weeks (notice I said sometimes not once in a while or rarely ). Now, don't get me wrong, when it was stable it was fantastic, but the issues remained constant and I just couldn't take it.

The final straw was shortly after I had moved to a new location. You see, for a while I figured it might of been related to the apartment I was living at but I had moved in to a new house and the issue persisted. So there it was, about 3 months in to the new place and it went out for around 3 1/2 weeks. I kid you not. I finally sucked it up and cancelled and went to DSL. Everything has been great since then. Sure it's not as fast as charter but I've only had one issue with it in 2 years and it lasted all of a few hours if that.

There are annoyances though that I came to find out shortly after getting DSL. The main gripe is the fact that if you use external mail accounts (ie, non att.net) that you have to use their smtp servers regardless. Normally you'd use something like "mail.yourdomain.com" for both the smtp and pop3 but you are forced to use the AT&T SSL one. OK, not a big deal I guess. It's just annoying when you setup a new email account on some domain you own and need to login to the Yahoo mail site and "verify it" so that you can send emails from the domain that is not even associated with AT&T -- bizarre, I know. Once things are setup you forget about it being annoying since it's not too often you'll be setting up new email accounts anyways.

So that brings me to now, my current delima. As I'm developing this site I obviously had a neeed for some specific "bterrill.com" email addresses. I set up the first one without a problem; I did that 2 years ago. I setup another one yesterday and haven't been able to figure out why it won't work. Finally I remembered I had to go do this ghetto thing on Yahoo mail so AT&T would let me use their SMTP server. I figured I'd set it up real quick and that would be that, but not going to happen buddy.

I admit I might of been premature in my celebration of figuring out the problem but that's when I got slapped in the face with this:

Unfortunately, there was a problem:
You currently have the maximum number of accounts allowed.

What what what?! I'm limited to only 10 emails? Oh man, I own quite a few domains and while I've only been focusing on one site for the last few years I have initiated development on a handful more due to be completed over the course of this year which will require even more emails than I currently require.

What the hell are they thinking?. Why do they even require us to bounce through their server in the first place? This is severly limiting. If anyone knows how to bypass this let me know. It will be a sad day if I have to go back to Charter simply because they will allow me to utilize my own mail servers which is my preferance.

I'm so angry right now. I'm sure if I paid I could get more but why the hell would I do that when I don't even use their email service at all? That's my entire reason for frustration. I own my own servers for webhosting and my other sites and I own many domains. I use my own mail server for pop3 but AT&T doesn't allow me to use my own SMTP servers so I'm stuck to theirs and limited unless I pay for something I'm not even using?.

I think I'll go drowned my sorrows in this weeks Episode of Heroes.