Comcast/Xfinity and 3rd Party Email Client Access

[britechguy]

I could have sworn I posted this here before, but a search seems to indicate I did not. Today, for the second time in several months, I have been hit with the inability to set up a comcast.net address in an email client, and for some reason had forgotten what I'm about to share. For some reason, Comcast decided to make all accounts unable to be accessed by third party email clients unless you tweak a setting to allow that again using the Comcast/Xfinity webmail site. Below is what I posted elsewhere in June. The really fun thing is that the failure message on the client end gives you not a bit of useful information about third party clients being blocked. Even when you give the correct email address and password, the failure looks like an inability to connect just like you get for a bad password situation.

What's really shocking is that the client I worked with today had a Comcast tech at her home in regard to this and he could not figure out what was wrong. You'd think, of all people, a Comcast tech should be aware of this change!

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Fairly recently Comcast has put in a security setting on their server side, which can only be accessed for tweaking via their webmail interface, that blocks access to Comcast email accounts by third-party email clients. When you go to set your account up everything looks hunky-dorey until the very end, when the connection is refused, even though all of the server and port information that's set up is correct.

For "the full skinny" see this page: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/email-client-programs-with-xfinity-email
From that page, these are the step-by-step instructions for doing the configuration on the Comcast/Xfinity server side so that email clients can once again access your email accounts: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/third-party-email-access

The specific step-by step directions from the last linked page are as follows. I presume that all members here can do the translation from "click on" to "gain focus on, then activate:"
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Update email security settings​

1. Sign in to Xfinity Email using your Xfinity ID and password.
2. In the top-right corner, click the Gear icon, then select Settings.
3. Click Security.
4. Uncheck the box under Third Party Access Security to prevent third-party programs access to your Xfinity Email, or check the box to allow access.

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The implication from step number one is that this setting is at the account level, so if you have more than one Comcast email address I suspect you will have to repeat the above for each account to which you wish to have access using a third-party email client, no matter what client that may be.

 

[seashore]

What's really shocking is that the client I worked with today had a Comcast tech at her home in regard to this and he could not figure out what was wrong. You'd think, of all people, a Comcast tech should be aware of this change!

ISP tech support seems to be lacking sometimes.
One of my customers could not log into her ISP email. She called tech support who reset their password to try to resolve it, no success, they said ok at their end so must be a problem at customer's end.
She called me to to take a look. Turns out they had only changed her account management password and somehow forgot their recently implemented policy of requiring an app password for mail clients. I generated an app password - all fine.