Contributor
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45 Messages
Recovery phone number
I have two email addresses - the primary address for the account and a secondary address I use for email related to a club I manage. When I log in with the secondary address, it now asks me to add a mobile phone number to the account. Every. Single. Time. But when I tell it to use my one and only mobile number, it rejects it because it is already in use for another account. That is true, of course - it's the recovery number for the primary account.
So the question is: What genius decided that a phone number could only be the recovery number for a single account? What possible improvement in security results from expecting that there will be a distinct mobile phone number to go with each email address? And why isn't there a way to tell the system that I don't have another mobile phone number to give it?
Accepted Solution
dgtangman
Contributor
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45 Messages
10 months ago
Just to close out this thread, I followed the suggestion in one of the replies and chatting with a billing agent, who was able to add my mobile phone number to my secondary email account.
That turned out to be a serious mistake, because the next time I logged in on my primary email account I was informed that my mobile number was no longer usable for this account because it had been activated on another account. It took about four days to get it switched back. During that process I was able to confirm that there is no way (other than possibly contacting support) to just remove a mobile number from an account. You can replace it with a new number, but you can't just remove it.
Ultimate solution to my problem: Installed Thunderbird on my PC, enabled client access to email for the secondary account, and set up Thunderbird to handle email for the secondary account. Now I no longer need to log in on the Xfinity webmail interface to read incoming mail on that account, except for the relatively rare occasions when I want to check for email from my phone.
I continue to be unimpressed with Comcast's web developers. I've been complaining for years about the stupidity of having an unlabeled Delete icon right next to the unlabeled Recover icon in the Spam folder and not requiring confirmation before selected messages are permanently deleted. I stopped using two-factor authentication years ago, because the interface kept ignoring the check box that said not to request a text-message confirmation on this device. And I've been complaining for years about the stupidity of allowing a customer to have more than one email address and requiring a different mobile number for recovery or two-factor authentication for each address. None of these strike me as particularly intractable problems, although the requirement for a unique phone number for each email address might be related to some unfortunate design decision that's buried so deep in the code that it would be challenging to fix it today. But as long as I can access my email using IMAP, I can live with these problems.
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XfinityThomasC
Official Employee
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2K Messages
11 months ago
Hello, @dgtangman are you finding yourself in a password reset loop (continual requests to update, even after you’ve entered new login information):
Are you being given email as an alternative recovery?
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rela99
New Poster
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3 Messages
11 months ago
I feel your pain. I have 6 email addresses and one phone. I’m not setting up 5 phone numbers, Xfinity!
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