I use Comcast’s Xfinity email system for my email. Works fine, but it’s boring. Is there a way to change the theme or color scheme?
You’re in luck, actually, because Comcast just launched a new and significantly improved version of its web-based email system for Xfinity, one that adds themes! Well, they’re not themes in the sense of Windows, where it changes icons, colors, fonts, and sounds, but instead offers different color schemes. It’s a bit tricky to find where these settings are located in the interface, however, so a walk-thru is a good idea.
If you really want a fancy interface to Web based email, however, have you checked out Google’s Gmail service? It offers themes, multiple layouts and dozens of beautiful photographic wallpapers too. I’ve written extensively about Gmail, actually, and invite you to check out my Gmail help, including this article on Gmail themes.
But back to Xfinity! If you don’t have the new interface yet, you should very soon, in which case your home page will now look like this:
Definitely better than the old layout, more modern and attractive, but… there’s more you can change.
To start your customization, click on the gear icon on the top right. It produces a menu and one of the choices is “Settings“:
Notice also here you can see how much of your [generous] 10GB of space are taken up by your email and any messages you’ve saved or archived. If you’re getting close to 100% it might be time to do some housecleaning!
Settings gets you to a completely new area of the webmail interface, with all of these show on the left side:
By default it starts at “Mail“, and you can see there are lots of ways you can tweak and fine-tune things, but that’s not what you want! Instead, click on “Basic settings” just above the Mail choices. Turns out that your color scheme is a basic setting according to the team at Xfinity:
Make sure you have the right language — this is where you can change to Spanish if you want, for example! — time zone and if you want to see mail instantly once delivered, set a short refresh interval. What we want, however, is below all of that: Theme. Here are your choices:
Lots of options and pay particular attention to High Contrast if you’re finding the words get a bit confusing to see once you try out different colors.
Here’s Burnt Umber, and as you can see it instantly shows you how the color choice will change the interface:
Finally, though, I settle on Dark Green and the home screen suddenly looks way more pleasant:
So that’s it. No huge changes (though you should experiment with “View” options too) but some nice additions to the color scheme!