This step by step guide will take you through configuring the Mail.app on your Mac (running either Yosemite or the latest version of OS X, El Capitan) to use with your Comcast.net email address.
Apple has actually made it quite simple to automatically detect the correct settings, so this should be very quick.
- Launch Mail by going to your Applications folder and double-clicking it.
- If the Choose a Mail account provider… window does appear right away, select Mail from the main Menu Bar, and then Add Account… from the ‘drop-down’ list.
- On the Choose a Mail account provider… screen select Other Mail Account… and then click the Continue button.
- Once you’re at the Add a Mail account step, you’ll need to enter 3 (three) pieces of information: Your Name, your Comcast.net Email Address and the Password associated with that same email address. After each of the fields have been filled in, click the Sign In button.
- Now you’ll be asked which Apps you’d like to use with this Comcast account. Make sure that Mail is selected. The Notes App can be unselected. Click the Done button.
- Finished! Mail will now download all of your @comcast.net email messages. It may take a while for everything to finish downloading and importing if you’re ‘migrating’ your existing Comcast email address to a ‘new’ copy of Mail for OS X. If this is the first time you’re using your Comcast email address there will likely be a ‘welcome message’ – if you receive that in your Inbox, you should be totally set to go!
Comcast uses the word “support” differently than the rest of us. When they say something isn’t supported they don’t always mean it doesn’t work, it means they won’t help you with it if you call tech support, as in “that problem/issue isn’t supported”. They may have abandoned technical support services for POP3 even though the actual POP3 service still works.
I just followed the steps in this tutorial and they’re still completely accurate and working. You should not need to enter the server names manually, UNLESS you’re trying to setup POP3, which is not in the scope of this guide. Hope this helps clear things up. Cheers!
I was on the phone with APPLE support about some other issue (not mail). The woman claimed that COMCAST does not support MAIL using POP, is that correct? I do not think so as I have been using POP for 25 years. She insisted that this was the case and told me I must change it to IMAP. That was stupid, I know now, How do we get COMCAST to tell APPLE that indeed Comcast suppports apple mail with POP?
Err there is a lot more to do than this.
There are settings that must be set (like server name etc).
This needs to be updated to reflect all the information as usual COMCAST does not support APPLE mail very well.