Powerbook with Comcast webmail issues

I am using IE on a PC away from home and am trying to access Comcast and .mac mail from my home iMac. I know there are messages in both systems, as I have called home to find out, but it isn't possible to retrieve them. I have tried changing the Comcast forwarding and tried retrieving other POP mail through the .mac account to no avail. Isn't it odd that the two systems that I pay for (cable and .mac) don't work, and I have to resort to yahoo to get mail.

 

When I have these kinds of problems, it is usually because the SNMP authentication settings in Mail.app are wrong. For my cable modem ISP, I disable SNMP authentication. Works fine after that.

 

I use Safari to Access Comcast Mail and have no problems. Also, have you tried setting up the Comcast account in OSX Mail. The setup program sets it up for you automatically.

Other than that I'm stumped.

TEG

 

I just tried this on my Powerbook, using both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer (I'm running Panther 10.3.3, which should actually be irrelevant). I was able to successfully send mail from my Comcast account with both programs using the Comcast Web mail interface.

There should be very little going on local to your computer, other than submitting the form. You're not using your computer's SMTP server at all for a Web form, and everything is going over port 80 or 443 which are unlikely to be blocked by a firewall program. I know you said you turned of Norton firewall, but if I had to guess I'd guess some required HTTP headers are not getting sent. If Norton also has some sort of "privacy guard" software I would suspect that it is removing some required headers - specifically the referer header (HTTP_REFER).

Consider temporarilly uninstalling Norton completely. I had a similar problem with McAfee's firewall on a Windows box - even when "off" it was interfering with stuff somewhat.