Hmmm....I'm having a similar problem with my Comcast e-mail. One of my e-mail accounts (I have 4 with them) keeps rejecting my password, and I have not changed it, either. This started about a week ago.

I tend to believe that there is something going on at Comcast, and not locally, since I'm in Delaware, and Martha is in Florida.

I'll do some digging, as well.

 

Ooh that made me think of something to try to eliminate one possibility.

Martha, bring up a command prompt on one the PCs (Start->Run->Cmd).

At the command prompt type nslookup and press Enter. You should see a default DNS server name and IP address then a command prompt like this:

>

Type mail.comcast.net and press Enter. You should then see results for the server name, IP address, and aliases. If you get an error message then the problem is with Comcast's DNS servers. If nslookup does resolve the name then the problem lies elsewhere.

btw - type "exit" at the > prompt to exit nslookup or just close the command prompt window.

 

Oooops, wrong again. Your symptoms seemed different

Take two Macs and call me in the morning.

 

I just searched the DSLReports forum, and it seems that this is a current problem with Comcast:

http://www2.dslreports.com/forum/r21149880...th-Outlook-2007

 

OK, that's much more helpful.

You must have POP3 for incoming mail and (I assume) SMTP for outgoing. So right away we can zero in on the POP3 server.

Either their server is down and/or messed up, or something changed in between them and you which is stopping your message from getting through.

You could try to ping "mail.comcast.net" and see what address it resolves to. (It won't answer the ping, but that's not a problem.) I don't know if your email programs will differentiate between not being answered by the POP3 server or being answered but not having the password accepted. So I can't tell for sure whether you are even connecting up to the server at all.

If you are connecting up to the server and it's just not letting you log in, maybe their POP3 server has lost touch with their account information server.

 

as I'm cooking dinner my mind started to come alive.
given that i am getting a number of different IP addresses bouncing back as busy, I suspect that they have virtualized their mail system but are having issue load balancing between servers or are losing track of which queues have which tasks.
Either way don't get your blood pressure up right away because it will be a while before they get this stable again.
My guess is the time scale will be measured in weeks not hours.

 

I've been stuck before when one of several load-balanced servers crashes, but the system doesn't realize what happened. So since that server has zero load (because it is not responding), the balancer sends all the new requests to that server. Which, of course, get ignored.

Thus, what was supposed to improve speed and reliability ends up making it so that if any of the servers goes bad, it kills the entire system.

Kind of like going to the grocery store and having somebody tell you to get in lane seven because nobody else is in line there, but lane seven has no cashier.

 

[QUOTE=Starbrd,Sep 22 2008, 04:33 PM] Things will only be worse if you change to FiOS. I did that about two weeks ago seduced by the saleslady that came to my door and and brought the price down considerably.

Let me begin by saying that I have had very good experience with Comcast over the last 18 years. Much less tha one outage per year. If I call it gets answered by someone in the next town. Technical support has been good and they all speak English.

It took them the better part of a day to install FiOS. Then we started using it. Their program guide is messy and harder to use. Then we found out that their movies on demand, which my wife likes to use, is much more expensive, up to 7.95 instead of 4.95. For older movies, which are free in Comcast they charge 2.50. None of this was disclosed by the saleslady.

The difference in HD quality is imperceptible, even though I have a brand new Sharp 52" display. Their set top box is twice the size of the Comcast box.

And then I tried to call Verizon. It took more than 20 minutes and five menus before I got to speak to a live person, who then shuttled me to two others.

 

Martha,

Sounds like you might have a corrupted password. We had a similar problem and had to go through our server and have them reset the passwords, etc.

 

Maybe the dolphins have hacked your account.