Apple iPhone mail app "Cannot get mail" error on home router

Hi,

After working just fine for many days, even years, today my iphone mail app can not access mail.comcast.net when connected to my home Nighthawk (Netgear) router. I have never used the wifi signal that comes from my Xfinity modem, I only have used my personal wifi router. All it says is, "The mail server "mail.comcast.net" is not responding. Verify that you have entered the correct account info in the mail settings."

When my phone is just connected to a 5G connection, I can easily access my email. When I am connected to the Xfinity wifi from my home Xfinity modem, I can download and receive email to my iPhone mail app. But on my own personal router, I get an error message every time. I haven't changed any settings. I haven't done anything. Yesterday it worked great, today I can't do anything. I have tried rebooting my modem. I have tried rebooting the Netgear router. I have tried updating my username and password settings in my phone. I have tried restarting my phone. I have done everything that I can possibly think of and I still get the error when connected to the Netgear router on my home internet.

Why does my email not download to my phone when connected to this one wifi router?

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XfinityAirelle

Official Employee

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3.2K Messages

3 hours ago

peter381

Thank you for providing such detailed troubleshooting steps. Based on what you've described, this does not appear to be an issue with your Comcast email account itself, since you're able to successfully send and receive email when connected to cellular data and when connected directly to the Xfinity gateway's WiFi.

That points more toward something occurring on the Netgear router side of the connection. Since the issue only occurs when connected to the Nighthawk router, we'd recommend checking for any recent firmware updates, DNS settings, security settings, parental controls, firewall features, or traffic filtering that may be interfering with the connection to mail.comcast.net.

A couple of quick tests that may help narrow this down:

Try accessing your Comcast email through a web browser while connected to the Netgear router to see if that works normally.
If possible, temporarily change the router's DNS servers to a public DNS provider such as Google (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and test again.
Check for any security features within the Netgear router that may be blocking email ports or mail server traffic.

Since you've already rebooted the modem, router, and phone, and the issue is isolated specifically to the Nighthawk connection, the router itself is the most likely place to focus troubleshooting next.

Let us know if you're able to access your Comcast email through a browser while connected to the Netgear router. That will help us determine whether this is an email app issue or a network communication issue.

peter381

New Poster

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4 Messages

Thank you for your quick response. It is already significantly more helpful than the 30 minutes I spent trying to explain the issue using the Xfinity support chat. That person did not seem to understand my issue at all.

So on a device connected to my Netgear router, I have no problem at all access my e-mail through the Xfinity website. Through the web browser it has no issues connecting to and receiving my new email messages.

I checked my Netgear set-up and changed my DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 instead of what it was set to originally. I rebooted the router after this change. I have made zero firmware updates to my router and I have not made a single change to any other settings. This did not solve my issue with access email through the iPhone Mail app.

Like I said, this happened overnight. No changes were made on my end and access to my email works great in every other way. The only time access seemed to be restricted is on the wifi networks from my Netgear router that I've been using for years. Is it possible xfinity is blocking access to mail.comcast.net from a specific MAC address related to this wifi signal? I'm not using a VPN either

2 hours ago

XfinityAirelle

Official Employee

•

3.2K Messages

peter381

Thank you for testing that and providing those additional details. That actually helps narrow things down quite a bit.

The fact that you can successfully access your Comcast email through a web browser while connected to the Netgear router tells us that the router is not completely blocking access to Comcast's email systems. If Xfinity were blocking access based on the router's MAC address or public IP address, we would generally expect webmail access to fail as well.

What makes this unusual is that the issue appears to be isolated to the Apple Mail app communicating with the mail server while connected to that specific network. Since the same iPhone works on cellular data and when connected directly to the Xfinity gateway, we can reasonably rule out the email account credentials themselves.

A few questions come to mind:

Do you have any other devices using an email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, another iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.) connected to the Netgear router that can successfully connect to the Comcast mail server?
In the iPhone Mail settings, is the incoming server set to imap.comcast.net and the outgoing server set to smtp.comcast.net, or is it configured to use mail.comcast.net?
Have you tried removing the Comcast account from the iPhone Mail app and re-adding it?

Given that the issue started suddenly without any changes on your end, it's possible that something has become corrupted in the connection profile between the Mail app and the server. Before going down that road, I'd be interested to see whether the issue affects only this iPhone or any other email client connected through the Netgear router.

If you can confirm whether other email clients on the Netgear network are able to connect, that will help determine whether we're looking at an Apple Mail issue or something more specific to how the router is handling IMAP/SMTP traffic.

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2 hours ago

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peter381

Apple iPhone mail app "Cannot get mail" error on home router

XfinityAirelle

peter381

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