It's apparently not just Safari, but also Apple Mail, I suspect because they both share WebKit or other structural elements. At least that's my tentative theory. I have a client who has two very old AT&T free email accounts (actually yahoo) which worked ok until a few weeks ago. Suddenly they could not access either account on two iMacs (Mojave), two iPhones, and an iPad (iPhones and iPad are pretty new models running the current iOS). So that might let the version of Safari off the hook, because of the iPhones and iPad having the same problem.
After spending a couple hours on the phone with AT&T tech support we finally managed to reset a password which gave us access in Firefox but still not in Mail or Safari. Finally clients're incentivized to move to a different mail host, which I've been bugging them about for years.