How can this be done?

[Ed Ahern]

I have Outlook, not Mail, on my desktop Win 10 machine.
I have been trying to use the outlook app for my android phone.
I want to have synched calendars.
what do I have to do?
help


Ed

[VanguardLH]

Depends on where you have your e-mail account. That you have an e-mail
client by whatever name does not say WHO is the e-mail provider. For
example, in my Outlook client on my desktop and in my Outlook app on my
Android phone, I have Hotmail, Comcast, and Gmail accounts defined. The
e-mail clients are not restricted to where they can connect.

If it is at Microsoft (Hotmail.com, Live.com, Outlook.com) then Outlook
can use Exchange to sync to your online account. By using Exchange as
the communications protocol, MS Outlook whether full desktop client,
Android app, or webmail client will all stay in sync with each other for
e-mail, calendar, and contacts because they all sync to the same server.

Although the Outlook app includes showing my OneDrive files, I prefer
using the OneDrive app for that management task.

[Ed Ahern]

My e-mail account is with Comcast.
web based seems to me to get hacked regularly (one man's opinion)


"VanguardLH" wrote in message news:epgeur...@mid.individual.net...

[VanguardLH]

Ed Ahern <eaher...@comcast.net> wrote:

> My e-mail account is with Comcast. web based seems to me to get hacked
> regularly (one man's opinion)

Using or not using the webmail client won't alter its susceptibility to
hacking, especially if you use weak passwords. No one is bothering to
hack your local desktop e-mail client. They're hacking the account
which online regardless of what access method you use to get to your
account.

Comcast supports POP and IMAP (to retrieve e-mails) and SMTP (to send
e-mails). There is no Exchange or other e-mail protocol support (except
maybe for business-class customers). POP and IMAP support only e-mail,
not contacts nor calendars.

https://www.xfinity.com/support/internet/using-xfinity-connect-calendar/

That makes it look like Comcast provided a means of synchroning your
online calendar (in your Comcast account) to MS Outlook. However, once
you log into your Comcast account, go to their webmail page, and click
on the Calendar tab, clicking on the Sync link results in "page not
found". Could be a feature they dropped or are planning but have not
implemented. I suspect it is a one-way sync: you use their webmail
client, the Sync creates a file, and you import that file into Outlook
to update the calendar inside of Outlook. That's a rather manual chore.

https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/access-outlook-plugin/

That makes it appear that Comcast required you download and install a
plug-in into Outlook. The plug-in would take care of the sync. Alas,
again, that page cannot be found.

https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/email/configuring-microsoft-outlook-email-box/

From that page, Comcast offers Exchange servers to business users. That
means you could define an Exchange account in Outlook to have it connect
to your Comcast e-mail account. Depending on whether or not they added
support for them, it's possible when using Exchange to also sync the
calendar and contacts.

https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/comcast-business-email-hosted-exchange-migration/

I cannot tell if Comcast customers are losing their Exchange accounts
with @comcast.net as the right-token in their e-mail address and are
getting pushed to hotmail.com, live.com, or outlook.com to use
Microsoft's Exchange servers or if their customers get to continue using
their old e-mail addresses but with Exchange servers hosted by
Microsoft. Office 365 uses Exchange. Hosted Exchange means Exchange
servers owned by Microsoft but managed by Comcast (and probably had a
Comcast domain or a registered one the user brought as their e-mail
address. Losing the hosted Exchange servers means Comcast customers
would be switching to connecting to Microsoft's Exchange servers. I
don't know if that entails keeping or losing the old e-mail address on
the new server. Microsoft could support the comcast.net domain for
accounts migrated to their Exchange servers. However, all that Exchange
stuff related only to Comcast business-class customers, not to you.

Outlook already supports Exchange and has done so for a very long time.
Make me think their plug-in was needed because Comcast uses a
proprietary protocol to access e-mail, calendar, and contacts,
especially since Comcast used to contract their webmail services from
Zimbra but that changed. Comcast switched to Open-Xchange's OX App
Suite (www.open-xchange.com/portfolio/ox-app-suite/) and customized the
GUI and rebranded it as Comcast's webmail client. When connecting to
their webmail client that used Zimbra's contracted webmail client, you
could see "zimbra" in the URL. Now with Open-Xchange used as their
webmail client, "appsuite" appears in the URL. Although Xchange is in
the company's name, their site never mentions Microsoft's Exchange
protocol. Instead they mention "All communication from and to the users
client is purely based on HTTP/HTTPS. The HTTP API is the core API for
all user functionality and is based on JSON via HTTP(S)." According to
Wikipedia, Open-Xchange is "a Linux-based email and groupware solution
that was positioned as open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange".
While based on HTML5 and Javascript, it's another proprietary
communications protocol atop those standard protocols hence why you
probably need Comcast's plug-in for Outlook. Although Comcast appears
to provide [access to] Exchange servers for their business customers, it
doesn't look like Comcast is migrating to Exchange for e-mail, calendar,
and contacts but instead going with some other proprietary albeit open
sourced communications protocol.

Well, if a plug-in is needed in MS Outlook to communicate with the
Open-Xchange server used by Comcast, you'll have to find it. Good luck
with that. Maybe their tech chat folks know where it is. Their web
pages don't. However, the Outlook app on Android doesn't support
plug-ins. The Outlook app will allow integration with other calendaring
apps, like Evernote, Facebook, and Wunderlist. I've not used any of
those.

I remember hitting a Comcast downloads page but cannot find it again.
The Plaxo plug-in was listed there. So I did another search and found:

http://stage.calendar.comcast.net/calendar/outlook

If that is the Comcast plug-in for Outlook to access your Comcast
account for e-mail, calendar, and contacts (as the page says) then you
could get those into your desktop Outlook client -- provided this
plug-in still works. This plug-in might be from the days when Comcast
contracted Zimbra to provide Comcast's webmail client. Support for that
plug-in lists only Outlook 2007 and 2010, not Outlook 2013 and 2016, so
I suspect its an old and likely unapplicable plug-in.

Comcast has their Xfinity Connect app for Android. Alas, it doesn't do
calendering, just e-mail, voice (wifi VOIP), texting, and contacts.
Even if Comcast tells you were to find their plug-in for Outlook, and if
it supports e-mail, calendar, and contacts, that won't help you with the
Outlook app on Android. That's why I asked if you had a Microsoft
account for e-mail since both the desktop and Android clients support
Exchange accounts at Hotmail.com, Live.com, and Outlook.com.