E-mail

Hi, @GarryM1

Are you sending the emails from the Xfinity website or from a third party email like Outlook or Apple mail? 

The e-mail issue occurs when trying to send e-mail from my devices, such as Outlook and Apple mail, which we always use the e-mail system on our devices as it is easier to use than the xfinity website.

Concern moved here to the proper help section...

Good afternoon,

Reviewing our logs it confirms that a third party email client attempting to access the email account via the qwest network is failing authentication. This causes there to be a temporary block on access via third party email clients and preventing the sending of emails due to a large amount of failures. The email client either has the wrong username/password combination or is misconfigured. To note, there appears to be common issues with sleep mode on devices that causes email clients to fail authentication during its sleep mode cycle. You will want to troubleshoot any devices that may be failing authentication - once it is resolved you will cease to have the issue.

You state that "The email client either has the wrong username/password combination or is misconfigured.", but why would I have a wrong username/password combination or be misconfigured only part of the time on multiple devices, a PC, MAC and iphone, as the e-mails do eventually send.  You then state that  "there appears to be common issues with sleep mode on devices that causes email clients to fail authentication during its sleep mode cycle."  However there are many times in the morning when I am working on my computer,sending e-mails and them all of a sudden it stops sending, so the send cycle stops when the computer is not in sleep mode and then when I am not using the computer, the e-mails sitting in my outbox send, such as last night when all e-mails sitting in my outbox sent at 10:11pm.

As a follow-up, this morning I have been sending e-mails.  I sent an e-mail at 5:49 am, but then when I tried to send an e-mail at 6:00 am, it did not send.  I will let you know when your e-mail system does let me send this morning's e-mails which are hung up in my outbox.

Good afternoon,

To clarify a bit, the temporary block does not distinguish where your "active" session is for the failed authentication attempts. You may be accessing on your PC, but your other devices could be causing a fault and not authenticating properly to the server in which the server responds with "this is an attack" and places a temporary(part of the time) block on the mailbox. When said block is automatically lifted by the server, it will automatically allow the sending of emails again. I was able to locate a LAN IP of 192.168.1.100 originating from the Qwest/CenturyLink network in our logs. If you are able to locate the device within the network with that designation, it will point to the device sometimes failing authentication and causing this issue. You would want to troubleshoot the email client you are using on that device and maybe even try uninstalling/reinstalling the email client and/or check for updates from your email client provider(Outlook, Windows Live Mail, MacMail, iPhone mail, Thunderbird, etc.).

Why would software authenticate one minute and not the next?

Comcast would be unable to answer this question to any extent. Comcast does not design, code, maintain, or modify the software.