Thunderbird no longer working with verizon.net

[lamotto]

I've been using Thunderbird successfully for years with my verizon.net account.

Last night, I started getting the following error messages through Thunderbird whenever I tried sending a message (incoming mail is fine)

An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded:  Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information. Please check the message and try again.

Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent because the connection to SMTP server outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net was lost in the middle of the transaction. Try again or contact your network administrator.

When I try sending mail through the web, it works just fine.  It is definitely a Thunderbird issue and the server settings are correct.  Other Thunderbird users have mentioned receiving these messages in other forums.

When I went to Yahoo Mail Help (as opposed to verizon), I stumbled across the following mail article:

Do I have to sign up for Yahoo! Mail Plus to POP my email?

ID: SLN3422

Refers to: Mail , Mail Classic , Mobile Mail

Description

This explains that Yahoo! Mail Plus is required to use an external email program such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Apple Mail.

Resolution

The ability to access Yahoo! Mail through a POP3 email client—for example, Outlook or Outlook Express—is only available to customers of our premium Yahoo! Mail Plus service.

If you have not purchased the Yahoo! Mail Plus service, you will be unable to retrieve messages through an email client. To find out if you have this service, please visit the My Services page.

For a list of supported email clients and instructions on how to set them up, see Accessing Yahoo! Mail Plus using an external email program

If you continue to experience errors, then please click Contact Yahoo! on this page.

Last updated: February 29, 2012

As I said previously, I am able to receive mail, but sending new messages, replying and forwarding are all gone unless I go directly to the website.

Does this mean that we will now have to pay $20 a year to Yahoo to use email clients for our Verizon accounts??  It seems a bit beyond the pale, but I can find no other explanation for what I'm seeing.  If anyone can shed light on the situation, I'd appreciate it.  It seems to me that Verizon customers should automatically get Yahoo! Mail Plus service if that is what is going to be required to use popular POP3 email clients.

[Anthony_VZ]

No you do not. That resolution regarding upgrading to Yahoo plus is for someone trying to use a pop client with an @yahoo.com account. Since you have an @verizon.net account you do not have to do that upgrade. If you are getting a possible abuse error, it usually means something happened to flag your account as spam. This clears after 24 hours though. This comes from certain words in the subject line or body. If you have a virus scanning program, it could include in your message a line about the email being scanned. Others who have sent spam may have had the same tag. This would cause your emails to be flagged as spam having the same verbiage as them. You may want to disable this extra line posting.