Comcast mail and Usenet connections have been refused since yesterday p.m. What changed?

Those of you spot the tweets over >>> there will notice that I was having problems with e-mail and Usenet connectivity since yesterday.

What changed?

After much poking and what not, here's what needed changing. I'm putting it here so I can find it again should the situation pop up.

Error msgs indicated that comcast mail connection refused as was pop.gmail. Wassup with that?

Being as I send mail to my personal accounts both to comcast.net and to a gmail account as backup, I could still read my e-mails.

As an aside ... turns out =still= that about 10% of mail sent to comcast.net lands in some sys$null in comcastland. The mail that is picked up from the gmail account is more complete. I check the comcast.net bin every once in a bit in case someone sent e-mail directly to the comcast.net account. Usually the only source of mail sent directly to the comcast.net account is comcast itself.

I use the gmail account when I'm "wandering". ...
When I'm "home," Tbird grabs the gmail account POP mail and puts it in my local folder.

SOLN: (hours later): for whatever reason thunderbird.exe was no longer on McAfee's goodguy list. Add thunderbird.exe to the goodguy list maintained by McAfee's firewall.

That cleared some of the problems, but next up: pop.gmail.com timed out.

SOLN: the word from gmail. Simply put: Use port 995. Have SSL set.

So what happened 'twixt then and now? I'm not sure. I suspect the problems with the McAfee firewall are connected with an update they pushed yesterday. I have no idea where the port/SSL problems with gmail came from. Maybe I fiddled things around while I was trying to make things work earlier today and forgot to set things back where they were. Happens.

Update: Outgoing mail wasn't going out this morning. (You can tell how much e-mail =I= send.) Had to set the port for smtp.comcast.net to 587. Comcast.net blocks the default port: 25.