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.