Another football in the Verizon Yahoo/Shuffle are those Verizon customers who were sold to Frontier but had verizon.net email addresses.

Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com.

Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.

During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in Outlook.

FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.

> but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.

So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.

It has caused no end of trouble for older folks who are still using yahoo.com and aol.com and sbcglobal email addresses who can't get any sort of sane support and are having a nightmare time getting into their email accounts that are linked to everything they've signed up for in the last 30 years.

Customers who had sbcglobal and att email addresses ended up using Yahoo for email, which I always found ironic.