I keep getting emails that my comcast email account must be changed to yahoo in order to get forwarded mail.
At this juncture, I wonder if this is spam or a hack or whatever. I know this has been touched on, but am I the only one? Is this real?
Thank you, Patrick
Itâs real, hereâs a Comcast article about it: Upgrade your comcast.net email experience to Yahoo Mail - Xfinity Support. So the emails youâre getting (and Iâm getting, and numerous others are undoubtedly getting) are probably real. I say probably because itâs not beyond the realm of possibility that someone will send similar looking scam emails, so the standard guidance applies, donât click links or call phone numbers in emails. But the transition from comcast.net to Yahoo! is definitely real.
Does anyone know how to switch it to Gmail instead of Yahoo?
Thatâs not even remotely possible.
That sounds a little weird. The article blm linked to suggests the switch to Yahoo is optional. One of the FAQs is:
Do I have to upgrade my comcast.net email account to Yahoo Mail?
No, this is an upgrade we are offering customers at no cost so they can access their email on a better platform with enhanced security, more features, and a mobile app for easy access on the go.
On the other hand, itâs not crazy to think that because of the fight against spam, receiving forwarded mail might be a casualty of Yahoo partially taking over hosting of comcast.net emails.
Hereâs a link to help you verify if the email is real: Identify official emails for the Comcast.net email upgrade to Yahoo Mail - Xfinity Support .
@chirano makes a good point about the possibility of fake email messages that appear to be from Comcast/Xfinity, but really are phishing emails trying to get you to divulge your Comcast credentials to bad actors. To avoid that, you can follow the steps in the email message that he linked, or, perhaps better yet, just visit the Comcast/Xfinity website directly and sign into your account. If you are eligible to switch, youâll see a message of one sort or another shortly after you sign in:
As was discussed on another thread, there basically are three options:
Itâs not a bad idea to export your Comcast mail as a backup file before trying any migration.
I have a comcast.net address, given to me when I signed up for my cable modem service.
Iâve never used it, except maybe once a year to see if any mail was delivered. And aside from 2-3 pieces of spam (donât ask me how they got that address) and 2-3 notices from Comcast (which were also sent to the e-mail address I normally use), thereâs been nothing.
I plan to ignore all the notices. Iâm curious if Iâll end up transferred to Yahoo anyway, or if the mailbox will just be shut down.
If you export your Comcast email:
I donât have a lot of emails in my Comcast account, so I figured that using various options in the Xfinity export tool would be both feasible and quick. That was the case.
Important Note: Everything I say in this comment is in reference to the Comcast Export Tool at the Xfinity Export Portal, which only saves a copy of your emails in a place of your choosing. This is not in reference to Comcastâs Yahoo account migration tool, which moves your entire Comcast email account off the Comcast servers and onto Yahooâs servers, including your Comcast email address and your existing emails. Be sure that you understand the difference between those two tools before using Comcastâs Yahoo account migration tool.
To @janesprandoâs first question: if you use the export tool either to save an export file to your computer or to export your Comcast emails (and optionally your Comcast contacts) to another service, your original emails will remain on the Comcast server.
To the second question: when you save your exported Comcast data to a file, you can
Comcast offers a few options for the export file format. Comcastâs instructions for exporting do a good job of explaining why you would choose one format or another, largely based on what you eventually want to do with the files. The important thing to remember is that when you use the export tool, you only are making copies of your emails. You are not moving your original Comcast emails or your Comcast email account.
To the third question, the export tool will save the emails, retaining the folder organization you had in your Comcast account. The specifics depend on your choice of export format. For example, I chose to use the MBOX format, which resulted in one MBOX file for each folder, such as the inbox, sent mail, and any custom folders that I had created.
Comcastâs export tool allows one other major option: if you already have a Gmail, Outlook, AOL, or other email account, like a third party IMAP account, you can try directly exporting your existing Comcast emails into one of those other accounts. Again, this only copies your Comcast emailsâŚit does not move your Comcast email account. For example, if you copy your existing emails to a Gmail account, they are simply stored in Gmail. Your Comcast account, and the ability to send or receive new Comcast emails, remains at Comcast. That said, this is a good option for people who want to back up their Comcast email and see the results right away.
The basic process for copying your Comcast email to a service like Gmail is to choose that option in the Comcast export tool and then run it. You will be prompted to supply your Gmail security credentials (for example) to connect your Comcast account and your Gmail account to the import tool, called ShuttleCloud. Once you click a few acknowledgments, the ShuttleCloud tool will start copying your emails from Comcast to your new service. Depending on how many emails and folders are in your Comcast account, it may take anywhere from a few moments to a day or so to copy everything from Comcast to a Gmail account. Your Comcast emails will appear in the left sidebar of Gmail (for example), labelled by Comcast folder. Every service handles the transfer a little differently, but the idea is the same.
Personally, I think the safest route is to save an export file to your computer first, since that has the fewest technical steps. Once you have a good backup file on your computer, you can try the other methods confidently.
PS. If you use the Comcast export tool to save your emails and/or contacts as a file, the files are encrypted for security. Youâll be shown the encryption password during the final step of the export process, and youâll also receive an email to your Comcast account that includes the password. Be sure you save the password or that you can access the email before deleting it or migrating to Yahoo!
Iâm in the same boat â received my comcast.net email address when we got Xfinity cable modem service years ago. Have never used it; Xfinity sends any email notices to my primary email address.
That said, when I log into the Xfinity site to check my account/payment info, or deal with service issues, the comcast.net email address is the âusernameâ I log in with.
Since Xfinity hasnât sent me any notices or warnings about having to change my username to something that doesnât end in â@comcast.netâ, I assume this isnât something I have to worry about.
You certainly should have received a warning, but you eventually should get a final notice at some point before the Comcast e-mail server retires completely.
Besides the Comcast export tool (actually very nice of them to provide that option) an alternative would be to connect Apple Mail, or Thunderbird or some other client, to the Comcast account, and then use Mail to export your mail to local files on your Macintosh.
I would lean towards that approach myself, because I trust Apple Mail more than I do Comcast. And thereâs no reason you couldnât do both.
I recently migrated my mail hosting from one provider to another (neither was Comcast.) First, I exported backups of all my mailboxes to my Mac, just in case. But for the main migration, I just added the new IMAP account for mail and dragged the messages straight from one account to the other.
I occasionally log in to the Xfinity site. My account name is that address without any domain suffix. I assume the account isnât tied all that closely to the e-mail address.
Before accepting the offer to migrate to Yahoo!, I suggest anyone making the decision read the terms of service, specifically the Privacy Center link found on this page. Since Yahooâs takeover by Oath, the ways in which your data is used have become much more permissive and harder to opt out of.
Dan W. I figured something like that would happen. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place because Xfinity chose Yahoo (why why why) to demand us join as that is the only provider they will forward your comcast mail to, I believe. I hope Iâm wrong but I canât figure out how to make the default âforward to GMail.â Patrick
They are not âforwardingâ your Comcast mail to some newly-created Yahoo account. At least they wonât be when the transition completes.
Yahooâs servers will be hosting the comcast.net domain. When the transition completes, mail sent to that domain will be going directly to Yahoo-hosted mailboxes and Comcastâs mail server will (probably) be shut down.
So there isnât an option to forward mail anywhere else because (when the transition completes) they wonât be forwarding anything anywhere.
I just tested two email addresses that I receive by what seems like forwarding.
My Caltech alumni account, now managed my Microsoft, resends from my Caltech email address (which I have had troubles accessing from my Mac). That shows up in the header visible in Mail
My Verizon account appears to to come from my personal domain to Verizon and Yahoo back to my personal account. This only shows up in the Raw Source
email sent to my old AOL email does not come back to me. I am not sure where that came from.
Itâs hard to tell what exactly is happening there without looking in detail at your headers.
Your CalTech email most likely is hosted at Microsoft using the Education edition of Microsoft 365. If that is the case, no CalTech system ever needs to touch your email. CalTechâs alumni email administrators simply login to the Microsoft 365 portal to configure policies and services, but everything actually happens on Microsoft systems. This is very common for alumni email. Most schools in the USA that offer alumni email do it using the education editions of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Verizon, Yahoo, and AOL can be a little more complex to figure out, largely because they all ran under the same corporate umbrella at one point or another, so itâs possible that the underlying infrastructure is nominally in any one of those domains and is managed by service agreements among the brands. Unless you explicitly set up mail forwarding from one service to another, thatâs probably what is going on.
Thanks. The Microsoft system became came a pain in the rear to access and I didnât use it for much, so I set it up set it up to redirect incoming.
We use Verizon for Web access, but we phased out their email because we didnât use it much and I didnât want to deal with advertising from them.
