Do you use a Comcast email account? If so, you might be interested to know that Comcast email accounts are now IMAP-enabled. IMAP refers to the way your email application, such as Apple Mail, interacts with the mail server. IMAP offers more sophisticated email management if you access your email account using multiple computers, tablets or smartphones. (Read this previous Tech Tip about IMAP if you’d like to learn a bit more.) Comcast started to support IMAP around the end of 2013.
In my experience, Comcast was the last major email provider to support IMAP and I’m glad they finally do. Over the past few months I’ve switched a number of users from using POP to using IMAP to access their Comcast account. This way, when they delete an email from their Comcast Inbox on their iPhone, the message also disappears from the Inbox on their iPad or Mac.
According to this TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) article about Comcast adding IMAP support, customers might need to request to have their account migrated to one of Comcast’s new servers that supports IMAP. However, in my experience, when I’ve filled out that form, I’ve been notified that the account in question has already been migrated. Thus, I could simply proceed with adding the new IMAP account to my client’s email application, either Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook.
Apple’s Mail application can automatically set up and configure your Comcast account if you’re using OS X Mavericks or OS X Yosemite. Older versions of OS X might not be able to automatically set up your Comcast account so here are the settings you would need, if you were manually adding your Comcast account.
Comcast IMAP account details are:
Incoming server: imap.comcast.net, Port 993 with SSL on
Outgoing server: smtp.comcast.net. Port 465 with both SSL and Authentication on
Username: the first part of your email address, the part before the @ symbol. For example, if your Comcast address is then your username is tim