Some advice for Comcast customers: if you want to keep your comcast.net e-mail address when significantly changing your services, you should mention this sometime during the process. Nancy tells Consumerist that’s what she learned when she had Comcast combine her cable and Internet access and roll them into a Triple Play account. Sure, the installation went awry, but you expect that. She didn’t expect the company to shut off her e-mail account, since she was continuing as a Comcast customer and all. This was apparently very naive of her.

A couple of weeks ago we foolishly allowed Comcast to switch us over from two separate accounts – one for internet and one for tv – to a single Triple Play account rolling together her existing cable and

Naturally the installation went wrong. The first crew that came to our house put in the wrong kind of modem in the wrong place and severed the cable to the tv in our bedroom. The next crew fixed those problems, but severed the previously functioning cable to the tv in our den.

But the last straw happened today when my Comcast.net email address, which I’ve had for a nearly a decade and use for all my personal business, stopped working.

After 2 ½ hours on the phone to various customer service representatives I learned that the email address had been inactivated either because (a) that’s what automatically happened when Comcast closed our old separate internet account or because (b) the final bill for that account, dated July 26, had passed through the time-space continuum and was 43 days overdue as of Aug, 9, and Comcast automatically cuts off email from deadbeats like us.

I also learned that if we had wanted my longtime email address moved over to our new account, we should have asked. Our bad! Why would we want something like that?
I’ve now paid the bill (twice, actually – once from our bank account and once with a credit card). Supposedly I’ll have my email back within 24 hours. Comcast has promised!
That gives me plenty of time to move everything over to the gmail account I just opened.

Yes, it’s a fair assumption that your e-mail will be turned off while keeping the same Internet service provider. Yeah, who would want to maintain access to their decade-old e-mail address, anyway? Very proactive, Comcast.

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