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Authentication Failure - Comcast email account

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  • Last reply by Kennymsq

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I have several Comcast.net accounts that I have set up in Thunderbird. About 2-3 times per week, Thunderbird makes me re-enter one or more of my passwords, only for the comcast accounts. It says Authentication Failure, but I have not changed anything on the accounts, including passwords. Entering the same password works - for a while. Any idea how to stop this?

I have several Comcast.net accounts that I have set up in Thunderbird. About 2-3 times per week, Thunderbird makes me re-enter one or more of my passwords, only for the comcast accounts. It says Authentication Failure, but I have not changed anything on the accounts, including passwords. Entering the same password works - for a while. Any idea how to stop this?
Attached screenshots

Chosen solution

The problem seems to have been solved after I logged in directly to the Xfinity/Comcast email web page. There it asked me to change my password. I believe that this is happening about every 3 months ever since they had a security breach in early 2024. After I changed the password on that website, and then also in Thunderbird, the problem seemed to be resolved.

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have you changed your authentication method to oauth which is the new method for comcast?

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I checked and the authentication is oauth2. Some new info is that for whatever reason, comcast forced a password change. Once I changed it directly on the xfinity login page, and then (again) for thunderbird, the instances of this error , while not zero, are greatly reduced.\

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Chosen Solution

The problem seems to have been solved after I logged in directly to the Xfinity/Comcast email web page. There it asked me to change my password. I believe that this is happening about every 3 months ever since they had a security breach in early 2024. After I changed the password on that website, and then also in Thunderbird, the problem seemed to be resolved.

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I had the same issue for my comcast.net email account. I solved it by:

1. Removing the account from Thunderbird 2. Change the xfinity password online on xfinity.com 3. Add back the comcast.net account to Thunderbird

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The issue seems to be related to the relatively new comcast practice of frequently asking you to add/change your two-factor authentication. My observation is that when Comcast requests that upon authentication, Thunderbird does not always handle that appropriately. I have found 2 fixes. The first is to log in directly to comcast on the web and take care of the request that way, which is awkward. The second, and I have no clue why this works, is to leave Thunderbird open on the desktop, and it seems to get past this issue.

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