Cox.net Email Not Showing Up in Gmail? Your Mailbox Is on Yahoo Now

If your cox.net mail stopped arriving in Gmail and nothing you change in Gmail's settings brings it back, the reason is that your mailbox isn't at Cox any more. Cox announced at the end of 2023 that it was handing cox.net email over to Yahoo, moved the mailboxes across during 2024, and by October 2024 all mail for cox.net addresses was being delivered to Yahoo.¹ Your address stayed the same, but the server, the login and the rules all changed, and any Gmail setup pointing at Cox's old servers stopped working.

The settings that work now

These are Yahoo's settings for a cox.net address:²

The password is where nearly everyone gets stuck. Yahoo's cox.net page says "you must use the app password and not your regular account password".² With your normal password, Gmail just says "There was a problem connecting to pop.mail.yahoo.com". That's the exact error people were posting on the Cox forums in 2024, along with "It is impossible to add a cox.net email address using Yahoo servers". It isn't impossible. A Cox moderator eventually tested it and confirmed it works with an app password and the full cox.net address as the username.³

Getting the app password

If you've never signed in to Yahoo with your cox.net address, do that first. Go to mail.yahoo.com and sign in with your full cox.net address and your old Cox password, which finishes moving the account over.⁴ Then, per Yahoo's instructions:⁵

1. Open the Yahoo Account Security page (login.yahoo.com/account/security).
2. Under "External connections", choose "Create app password".
3. Give it a name, such as Gmail, and select "Generate password".
4. Copy the code and use it as the password in Gmail.

Yahoo only shows the code once. It keeps working if you change your main password later, and deleting it from the same page cuts off whatever was using it. The Yahoo post has more on app passwords if you get stuck.

Things that catch people out

In 2024 the usual fix on the Cox forums was to delete the cox.net account from Gmail and add it again with the app password. I wouldn't do that now. Google stopped letting new accounts be added to "Check mail from other accounts" after the first quarter of 2026,⁶ so a deleted account may not come back. Go to Settings, then Accounts and Imports, choose "edit info" on the existing cox.net entry and change the server, port and password there. I haven't been able to test whether Gmail still accepts that edit on every account, but it's the only route left that doesn't rely on adding a new one. There's more on this in the "not working" post.

Gmail's POP setup also leaves "Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server" unticked by default, so it deletes each message from Yahoo after collecting it. The Cox moderator pointed this out too.³ Tick it if you ever read your mail anywhere else.

And keep the mailbox alive. Yahoo treats a mailbox nobody has opened for 12 months as inactive and deletes everything in it, and signing in to your Yahoo account on its own doesn't count: you have to open Yahoo Mail.⁷ If Gmail is the only place you read your cox.net mail, open it in Yahoo Mail every few months.

Gmail's fetcher is ending anyway

Even once it's working, this has an end date. Google says "Check mail from other accounts" stopped taking new users after the first quarter of 2026, and existing users can keep it until January 2027.⁶ A second Google page adds that "Send as" for addresses outside Gmail ends at the same time, so replying from your cox.net address inside Gmail stops too.⁸ The end dates post has the detail.

Keeping cox.net mail in Gmail after that

Forwarding is the obvious answer, but Yahoo charges for it: automatic forwarding needs a Yahoo Mail Plus subscription.⁹ One person on the Cox forums summed it up as "they want $5 a month".¹⁰ The Gmail app on your phone can add a cox.net address with its Yahoo option, no app password needed, but that mail stays at Yahoo and never shows up in Gmail on the web.³ A desktop client like Thunderbird can copy the whole mailbox across once. I've compared these in more detail.

If you want it to keep working the way it did, with cox.net mail landing in your Gmail inbox on a schedule, that's what I built PopRelay for. You give it the settings from the table above and an app password (make a separate one for it, so you can delete that one on its own later), and it checks the mailbox and adds anything new to your Gmail through the Gmail API. It leaves your mail on Yahoo unless you tell it otherwise. It checks Yahoo-hosted addresses at most every 30 minutes, because Yahoo holds up logins that come more often than that, which I've written about in the Yahoo post. It only asks Google for permission to add messages and labels, so it can't read or delete what's already in your Gmail.

If that fits, you can set it up here. Whichever way you go, sort it out before January rather than after your inbox goes quiet.

Sources

1. Spam Resource, "Cox.net is now a Yahoo domain", 23 October 2024, accessed 28 October 2026.
2. Yahoo, "Update your cox.net email settings in Outlook, Mail on Mac and other third-party email clients", accessed 28 October 2026.
3. Cox Community, "Adding Yahoo transitioned email to Gmail", 17 May 2024, accessed 28 October 2026.
4. Cox Community, "Email: Cox to Yahoo to Gmail", 13 August 2024, accessed 28 October 2026.
5. Yahoo, "Generate and manage 3rd-party app passwords", accessed 28 October 2026.
6. Google, "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail", accessed 28 October 2026.
7. Yahoo, "Inactive mailboxes in Yahoo Mail", accessed 28 October 2026.
8. Google, "Learn about changes to third-party email account support in Gmail", accessed 28 October 2026.
9. Yahoo, "Enable automatic email forwarding in New Yahoo Mail", accessed 28 October 2026.
10. Cox Community, "Gmail POP-ing cox.net worked, now with yahoo hosting it doesn't", 19 April 2024, accessed 28 October 2026.