A fellow client contacted me with a real scare this morning. She happened to be a Mac user, viewing her messages in Apple Mail, and relied on her Comcast account as her primary address.

She told me that all of her Sent messages prior to March 1 were gone!! She claimed she did not delete them. At first I thought it was a Mac problem or an Apple Mail problem. Sadly, it was not. There was something more sinister at play.

So that every one of you knows — whether you check your Comcast e-mail on a iPhone, iPad, Mac or Windows system — the "master settings" are managed in the Comcast webmail system. You can get to that by visiting my.xfinity.com (formerly comcast.net) in your web browser. The area you need to focus in on when you are in the webmail inbox is Preferences, specifically the Mail section

Upon visiting that preference panel in my client’s Comcast account….we found that Sent Mail retention had been set to 30 days. She never did this!! It was changed without her permission. I changed it back for her. Fortunately, she had a backup of old emails on her external hard drive and I was able to restore sent messages since January 3.

So this is what you need to do
1. log into your Comcast web mail at my.xfinity.com
2. Click on the Envelope icon at the top
3. Click Preferences
4. Click Mail
5. Click Email Deletion Schedule
6. Mail sure everything but Trash (Deleted) and Spam are set to Never. You can set those two to the option that suits you.
7. Then click the blue Back button above

With this revealed, it is critical that you have a backup email account just in case your primary account goes bad. I have clients whose livelihood rests with their Comcast email account. Personally, I think this is a huge mistake. At the bare minimum, make a secondary account such as a free Gmail or iCloud for yourselves. You could even go with a paid account like Fastmail or Google Apps, which will give you some level of support with your account for $20 to $60 per year.