I changed my Xfinity passwords. Now all apple email accounts wont send through SMTP. Need help.

Yes, a similar thing happened to me. For about 8 hours yesterday, (after changing all my 8 Mail account passwords) all email accounts were work for both incoming and outgoing. And then, without my changing any settings in Mail on my computer or iPhones, all outgoing connections just went down and have stayed that way for the past day. That suggests very strongly that the issue is with Xfinity.

As for changing my email password again, I may try that, but if the current password is working for incoming, I know that it's valid, at least for incoming. Strange that it would fail just for outgoing. And on all 8 Mail accounts.

As a test, I tried removing one of my less important email accounts and adding it back in, and when I did, it only repopulated the received emails. All drafts, sent, junk, and trash emails did not repopulate. And the same problem still exists (after recreating this account), where I only have incoming, no outgoing. So that doesn't seem to work for me as a solution.

I very much need to get my email accounts back on line, but am seriously confused on what to do next. Do you think hiring a Mac tech from a support company is the best next step? Or is there another Apple channel that you could suggest?

Wow. All accounts sudden just went online fully.

Hmmm. I think you're right, it must be a problem at Xfinity, probably due to traffic volume due to breech issues.

If my accounts go down again, I'll let you know.

Thanks, Peter

Sadly, woke up this morning and all outgoing servers back down.

May just have to wait until Xfinity figures out a solution. Not sure what else to do other than move to another provider, a huge undertaking in terms of address updating and general work flow.

Akk. Must be Xfinity then.

As I mentioned in the initial post, I'm able to send email from my iPhone if I turn off the WIFI option and it sends over cellular. That's not a complete solution, because it doesn't solve the more important problem of sending from my computer, but I am curious why that would work. Is there a different SMTP internal routing structure at Xfinity that handles emails being sent over cellular. Or what weird spooky magic might cause that?

Good thought to check Keychain.

My review only came up with 1 password out of 8 being old and I updated that, but still no luck overall on getting outgoing mail to work.

I did notice that the "Account" field in the Keychain/System Roots/Passwords/Attributes section showed the account name as "xxyournamexx@comcast.net@smtp.comcast.net" instead of just "xxyournamexx@comcast.net", which is what is input in the email settings. I tried truncating down the longer account name in Attributes in Keychain, but that still didn't work.

Still flummoxed.

Unfortunately, I'm back.

Looks like my tweaks made in Keychain were a false sense of security, as I was probably making those tweaks when Xfinity was not experiencing a problem with their Outgoing serve. Doing the tweaks (during a short period of up-service) made it look like that fixed the problem, but this morning, all Outgoing SMTP was down again for all 8 accounts. Since then I've turned of Keychain entirely, hoping that will at least rule out that as a possible problem.

Are things still fixed on your end? (I'm in Eastern Massachusetts, BTW. Not sure if location has any bearing on the issue.)

Hi Tesserax,

Thanks for weighing in.

My setup worked fine until changing my Xfinity passwords due to data breech. But in the interest of trying everything, yes, I disabled Bitdefender and Little Snitch. I did not configure any firewall rules on my router. I've reset modem and router. Update modem firmware. Updated Sonoma operating system. Booted in Safe Mode. No luck.

From your assessment of my Log Activity (in italics below) it seems like you are suggesting Xfinity (if that is the client you are referring to) is the culprit. Or are you saying that Mac Mail is the client and it is the likely problem.

I'm at the point where I think I need to hire a Mac tech wiz, since I can't think of any other ways to fix this. But if it's on Xifinity's end, no amount of tweaking on my end will fix it. So I'm wondering what your best guess is. Is the Xfinity data breech and the resulting tsunami of people trying to change their passwords etc overwhelming the system and maybe I should wait a week. What is the Activity Log most likely pointing to?

This is where it goes wonky. Even though the authentication was

accepted, the client decides to terminate the connection. From there,

the client continues to re-establish a connection, succeeds, but

terminates it regardless. This goes on for a number of attempts, and

eventually, the SMTP server (based on its rules) decides there were too

many authentication attempts, and makes itself "unavailable" to the

client.

Of course the million dollar questions is, how would I fix this?

And it still doesn't seem to explain why sometimes SMTP Outgoing connections are online and sometimes they're not (when I'm not changing anything on my end).

Tesserax,

I only have Mac Mail as an email client on my iPhone and computer and I only have Xfinity (Comcast) email addresses. So can't easily test the non-Xfinity theory.

I input this in Terminal

ncat -v -4 smtp.mail.me.com 587

exactly as shown (with spaces after the t,v,4,& m)

Teminal comes back with

-bash: ncat: command not found

I'm I missing something?

Thanks for the recap, Mac Jim ID.

Latest developments. And **** if I know why.

All Ingoing and Outgoing mail accounts are currently shown as online in the Mail Connection Doctor. I have no idea why, although I'm seeing a pattern of Xfinity (Comcast) working as the day gets later and failing again in the morning and through most of the midday the next day, (probably something to do with traffic volume??). Bizarre.

Another thing: All my Comcast accounts seem to be sending and receiving at the moment except the most important, the primary account, which is not receiving any emails. When I send an email from the primary (to my primary account as well as other accounts), it appears to be sent and shows up as sent in the Sent folder, but will not show up in my primary in box (although other accounts do receive it, so I know it's being sent).

I reset my Xfinity primary password, but that didn't fix the primary account not receiving emails.

I feel like a ping pong ball. Trying to stay positive, but it's not easy.

Thanks for everyone's help so far.

I'm a little fearful of getting into Terminal and command line prompts, as I'm not savvy with any of that. I'd hate to create a cascade of other problems in the interest of solving one. Thanks for the direction anyway. I really appreciate the help.