About antgaucho

This is a follow-up to my other posts on this thread.  I am, for now, sticking to the less confusing, and working,  pop3.ge.xfinity.com .  My other settings, including the port number 995, are not changed. Posters on this thread using local hosts file workarounds could be in for additional rude surprises if Comcast makes even relatively gentler changes than the one causing all this trouble. ... View more

Anon1476264, I'm not seeing the extreme slowness issue you reported.  But I've had many similar experiences before and feel your pain.  Any chance you're going through a bottleneck caused by, say, a VPN?  BTW pop3.comcast.net does not work for me, while imap.ge.xfinity.com does. ... View more

    Dear Again, 1.  I still don't see imap.ge.xfinity.com mentioned in ComcastJessie's post.  In particular, it doesn't look  "corrected" to me. 2.  I couldn't guess why the platform underlying the mail client should influence which servernames work, so I tested the same Seamonkey settings on an old MSWindows VM I have.  They work.  Here they are Again (except for username), this time in screen shot:                 To recap, the above configuration is working on both GNU/Linux and MSWindows platforms. Has anyone seen these settings fail to connect? ... View more

rreesjones, Have you tried setting your incoming POP3 server to imap.ge.xfinity.com ? It looks counterintuitive, having "imap" in the nodename, but but that's the only change I had to make to get my comcast pop mail flowing again after Nov 19, and it is still working at this writing. The servername also happens to be the only detail that contradicts ComcastJessie's thread-launching post. Good luck     ... View more

Reply to AlexBoge , Yes, that's right.  Of all the settings that had been working for me for years, in the end the only one that needed changing was the server name.  My Seamonkey incoming settings for comcast POP3 are now: imap.ge.xfinity.com Port 995 SSL/TLS Normal password. ... View more

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Solution for (my) Mozilla Mail (Seamonkey or Thunderbird) client / Linux POP3 problem:       Change the SERVER to imap.ge.xfinity.com Problem and Analysis My two Comcast POP3 email configurations were out of order on Monday morning, Nov 19 2018.  They had been working the previous Friday.  These accounts are configured in the Seamonkey email client.  ( I tested Thunderbird to make sure it was not a Seamonkey-only issue.  Thunderbird failed similarly.)  The failure was at the connection stage, before authentication.  The error reads       Failed to connect to server mail.comcast.net. In both account configurations, the POP3 server had been set to mail.comcast.net, port number 995, for years of successful emailing. Consulting the Comcast support website produced a suggested alternative node name, pop3.comcast.net .  But this produced the same error:  "Failed to connect to server pop3.comcast.net" .  Thunderbird's errors were identical to Seamonkey's. Connection failure prompted me to ping them both, unsuccessfully.  This is not serious, as they may be configured to refuse ICMP echo requests, a common DOS defense.  Then, DNS lookup resolved both mail.comcast.net and pop3.comcast.net to canonical name imap.ge.xfinity.com . This suggested to me that Comcast had summarily discontinued POP3 support and rerouted POP3 server DNS entries to an IMAP server.  I found this troubling, but keep reading, because this suspicion turns out to be wrong, at least as of this writing... After some more time spent on the website, and four interactions with live customer service people, I asked the last one whether Comcast was discontinuing POP3 support, and she answered in the affirmative (This is wrong, remember?  Keep reading...) Acting on this last advice, I created IMAP versions of my POP3 configurations and started the very tedious process of copying over my trees of nearly 1,000 POP3 folders to the IMAP accounts. Background:  I might have configured them as IMAP in the first place, over 15 years ago (before Comcast bought the cable internet monopoly in my area from AT&T), had IMAP been available.  But that didn't happen, so I have an edifice that will be very inconvenient to convert should Comcast ever truly discontinue POP3 service. The Customer support phase above cost me about a half day's work.  The IMAP conversion process had cost me another 1/2 day, and was starting in on a second day.  Disappointing, as this is all to troubleshoot a paid service. Throughout both processes I occasionally experimented again with the POP3 configurations, still hoping I would hit on something that would spare me finishing the daunting conversion underway.  At last I hit on one that worked.  The improbably-named imap.ge.xfinity.com works as a POP3 (!) server. I can't explain why mail.comcast.net and pop3.comcast.net can no longer be resolved by my email client, while imap.ge.xfinity.com can, but I have something that works, and I don't have to spend another week creating an imperfect reflection of what I already had.  I had some distance to go on the folders, and had not even begun with the dozens of filters. My Comcast email is functioning again, so I'm no longer pursuing what went wrong.  My primary suspect would currently be possible DNS entry change(s) by Comcast. Comcast should not discontinue POP3 service.  If they consider it, they may change course after an analysis of (3) below (1)  Give a reasonable amount of warning. (2)  Be prepared for a sudden increase in customer service requests and complaints. (3)  Provide an array of POP3-to-IMAP conversion tools that handle complex folder trees, filters, etc..  It would have to take into consideration a large number of email clients.  This will cost, but is required to mitigate a major inconvenience to your longest-standing customers. This customer is using Seamonkey 2.49.4 on Linux 4.15.0-39-generic Mint 19 Tara . Thank you. ... View more