As a long-time Comcast customer I have been using their provided email services for decades. I have two comcast.net email accounts, and I have been using Alpine to read/send mail for those accounts. I've been happy with how that setup works. Well, last December I was notified that Comcast is moving all their comcast.net mail accounts to Yahoo Mail in 2026: https://www.xfinity.com/support/arti...ation-overview The mail addresses will be the same (i.e. still <user_name>@comcast.net) but the mail itself will be hosted in Yahoo Mail.

Ugh. I've had a throwaway Yahoo Mail account for years, and barely use it because I hate it so much. Their web interface is terrible. So I've been dreading this move. Yesterday I decided to take the plunge on my secondary comcast.net account, to see how difficult it would be to migrate that account to Yahoo Mail and use Thunderbird with it.

It turned out to be a little trickier than they let on. First, when logging in to the Comcast website I had to disable my ad blocker when going through the confirmation to migrate the accountthe confirmation simply would not submit otherwise. Then, it wasn't just a matter of setting the IMAP and SMTP servers in Thunderbirdthat didn't allow me to authenticate with my usual email password. Instead I first had to log in directly to Yahoo Mail with the new account and create a special app password for Thunderbird:

yahoo_security_app_password.png

Once that special app password was created I had to set the IMAP authentication method in Thunderbird to "Normal password" (with SSL/TLS) and use that special password there (and save it in Thunderbird). That step also required that I allow cookies in Thunderbird. That allowed me to read my email in Thunderbird, but I couldn't send email with that account using Yahoo's SMTP server. For SMTP authentication I had to use OAUth2 with SSL/TLS and my usual email password.

So now for that secondary comcast.net account I can use Thunderbird to receive and send mail with the comcast.net address even though it's being hosted by Yahoo Mail. Since I know now how to do all this I will start the migration of my primary comcast.net account in the next few days.

Has anyone else here had to do this? I don't mind using Thunderbird, but I'd really like to keep using Alpine, which I suspect will be a bit more difficult to set up for this.

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