Comcast blocks our email when travelling to a foreign country! (status?)

I'm about to do some foreign travel and my experience has been that Xfinity will notice I'm a accessing my email from a foreign country and will block all of my family email accounts. I will have to go online on each of them and somehow re-input my password, which is a [Edited: "Inappropriate Language"] while travelling with my phone. I hate that, and want to know how to turn off that feature. Alternatively, I want a way to tell Xfinity I'm going and NOT to turn off my email.
I've been using MS Outlook on my phone (not recommended) and they recently made it more difficult. Formerly it was possible to "repair" the account by looking up my 16-random-digit-password and re-entering it. Recently MS 'helped' by removing that ability, replacing it with "Reset" which does nothing.

Or, ideally, someone from Xfinity will post that they have stopped blocking travellers' emails because they realized it was too easy for bad guys to circumvent and was only a PITA to Xfinity customers.

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Again

Expert

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34.8K Messages

9 hours ago

@angelsix

I'm about to do some foreign travel and my experience has been that Xfinity will notice I'm a accessing my email from a foreign country and will block all of my family email accounts. I will have to go online on each of them and somehow re-input my password, which is a [Edited: "Inappropriate Language"] while travelling with my phone. I hate that, and want to know how to turn off that feature. Alternatively, I want a way to tell Xfinity I'm going and NOT to turn off my email.
I've been using MS Outlook on my phone (not recommended) and they recently made it more difficult. Formerly it was possible to "repair" the account by looking up my 16-random-digit-password and re-entering it. Recently MS 'helped' by removing that ability, replacing it with "Reset" which does nothing.

Or, ideally, someone from Xfinity will post that they have stopped blocking travellers' emails because they realized it was too easy for bad guys to circumvent and was only a PITA to Xfinity customers.

If you're trying to access your email on an email client, like Outlook, you will need to log into the website instead of using the email client.

XfinityDemetrise

Official Employee

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428 Messages

Hi there! @angelsix Please let me know if @Again 's suggestion works for you. If not, please feel free to follow up for further assistance. Thank you so much @Again for your partnership and for always being so helpful in the forum!

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9 hours ago

angelsix

Contributor

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71 Messages

OK, I understand how to do it, but not why Xfinity makes me go to all that trouble, and with no notification when it has kicked in except that suddenly I can't get email, and with no way ahead of time to tell the system it's OK. In a couple of months I'm going to do a river cruise in Europe, going through several different countries. Will Xfinity make me do this for all of my family's accounts in every country? Xfinity could do better.

7 hours ago

angelsix

Contributor

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71 Messages

BTW, Xfinitty's approach discourages careful password protection. It is a [Edited: "Inappropriate Language"] pain to pull each of the passwords out of my password manager, so much easier to just put them in a Keep box for quick cut & paste.

Also, I only figured out why it was happening after Googling the problem. Xfinity should do a better job of warning customers that their accounts will be disabled if they access from a foreign country. Could we avoid this by using a VPN with a location in the USA?

(edited)

7 hours ago

angelsix

Contributor

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71 Messages

@XfinityDemetrise On a side note -- Your AI (or whatever) looking for naughtiness is cute. In my original post, it censored my first reference acronym with a bit of naughtiness, but left in the identical 2nd one. Then it censored my two-word reference to a kind of bread originating thousands of years ago in the Middle East and Mediterranean because it included the same letters and hinted at the same acronym.

4 hours ago

angelsix

Contributor

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71 Messages

3 hours ago

According to Gemini, "Xfinity does not send advance notifications or proactive alerts warning users that their email access will be restricted or blocked when traveling to a foreign country. ... There is no official warning or documentation on the Xfinity website alerting users that their emails will be blocked while traveling internationally." All we users know is that suddenly our email isn't working and we have no idea why. This is a choice by Xfinity. By contrast, " Instead of blocking access by country, Gmail uses adaptive security. If it notices a login from an unusual foreign IP address, it may prompt you for a 2-Step Verification challenge or send a security alert to your recovery phone/email to verify it is really you."

But, yes, apparently there is a simple solution. Again, per Gemini, using a VPN with a spoofed location in the USA will bypass Xfinity's block.

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Comcast blocks our email when travelling to a foreign country! (status?)

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