Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Secondary Email Accounts in SmartZone

I wrote in a previous post that I was a little disappointed that in Comcast's new SmartZone email software you can no longer view email from a secondary account. My workaround was to forward all email from my secondary accounts to my primary account. It works well for me but I got some comments on the blog post that it was an ideal solution for everyone.

Interestingly I got an email from Comcast the other day entitled "Answering your questions about the SmartZone Communications Center. One of the FAQs in the email was how to see all of my Comcast email in one place. The solution is to add the secondary email accounts as External POP accounts using the below steps:
  1. Go to the Preferences tab
  2. Select the Email Manager sub tab
  3. Select Add External Account
  4. Enter Unique Account Name to identify the account (e.g. Sandra-Sec1-Ext)
  5. Enter the Secondary account's email address (e.g. Sandra-Sec1@comcast.net)
  6. Select POP3
  7. Enter Email Server: mail.comcast.net
  8. Enter password
  9. Click Test Settings to make sure the external account setup is correct
  10. Click Save

I went through the above steps with one of my secondary accounts and it does work although not exactly how I expected. It adds the account as a new folder within the folders list. You can see all of the emails in that account but when you send an email from that secondary account comes from your primary account. So I guess this solution is a little better but not quite as good as webmail where you could access all of your accounts and send email from those accounts separately. I do look forward to a future SmartZone release where I can access all of my accounts as I did in Webmail.

Still to me is a minor inconvenience for all of the new features that SmartZone has included. I have had much more time to use SmartZone since my original post and the more I get used to it the more I like it. Comcast can't make everyone happy but I think once customers get used to SmartZone they will like it as well. I think Comcast is trying hard to address customer concerns and questions by sending out emails, FAQs and Tutorials to attempt to resolve customer issues.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

SmartZone

This morning I was upgraded to Comcast's new email software called SmartZone and I have to say I really like it. I first heard about SmartZone back in November when I got an email from Comcast informing me that in a couple days I would be upgraded. A couple days, then weeks passed and no SmartZone. Around the end of November I got another email from Comcast staying that my upgrade was pending. Not sure what "pending" actually meant I went to the Comcast Help Forums and found that the servers where having some capacity issues and that they were suspending all upgrades until after the 1st of the new year.

So now here it is 3 months later and I am finally upgraded so I figured I would talk about what I like and don't like about SmartZone

What I like:
  • The interface is designed to work like Microsoft Outlook. So there is now all of that cool drag and drop and right-click functionality. Very intuitive and easy to use
  • I can still access my old address book and saved email folders.
  • My email box in now increased to 10 Gigabytes in space.

What I don't like:

  • I can no longer access secondary email accounts from the main page of my primary account. I have heard they are bringing back this functionality in a future release but it is not really that big a deal for me. I just turned forwarding on in my secondary account and have emails forwarded to my main account.
  • There seems to be a bit more advertising on the interface. I remember a little ad within the old interface but there seems to me more of it with SmartZone.
  • When I was logged on this morning the interface seemed to be a little slow. It seems fine now so I am now sure if it was a connection issue or an issue with the Comcast servers.

I think just like any new software it is going to take a little while to get used to SmartZone. Some things work a little differently like needing to double-click an email rather that single-click to open. Of course with all of the new functionality I am sure that SmartZone is going to be really slow on older computers. My two home PCs about a year old and my work PC is newish as well so I have seen no performance issues. Luckily, Comcast has released a SmartZone Lite version of the software for this very issue. I haven't used it yet but it can be accessed under preferences.

So overall I am very happy with SmartZone. After reading the comments in the Comcast Support forum I was expecting issues but for me the upgrade has been pretty painless. Working in the software industry myself I know how hard it is to keep everybody happy when you release new software but I think Comcast has done a pretty good job with this one.