Can't access IMAP email

Dave Rado

New Email
I have successfully using IMAP (with Thunderbird as my email client) for several years, to access my hotmail account (which is now hosted at outlook.live.com). Starting last night, however, whenever I open Thunderbird it says "Login to to server imap-mail.outlook.com failed". The dialog has the following buttons: "Retry," "Enter New Password," and "Cancel".

I know that my password is fine because I can still log in to the account successfully using my web browser.

If I click "Cancel,"I then see a Thunderbird message saying "Server [my email address] has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there may be a network problem."

It's an odd message in the first place because my email address is not the name of a server. And I know the mail server has not gone down and that there is no network problem, because as I mentioned previously, I can I can still log in to the account successfully using my web browser.

I haven't changed my IMAP settings within Thunderbird, and they were working fine until last night, so unless Microsoft has just changed what the settings need to be, they can't be the cause of the problem either.

So where do I go from here?


FWIW, my IMAP settings in Thunderbird are as follows:

Incoming:

Server type: IMAP Mail Server
Server name: imap-mail.outlook.com
Port: 993
Connection/security: SSL/TSL
Authentication method: Normal password

Outgoing:

Description: Microsoft Live Hotmail
Server name: smtp-mail.outlook.com
Port: 587
Connection security: STARTTLS
Authentication method: Normal password
username: [my email address]


Dave
 

rfs9999

IMAP Tools
>where do I go from here?

If you happen to have openssl installed then you can test your IMAP login like this:

openssl s_client -connect imap-mail.outlook.com:993

When it connects you will see a ton of SSL details followed by this:

* OK Outlook.com IMAP4rev1 server version 17.4.0.0 ready (BLU452-IMAP301)
Type "1 login username password" and hit "enter".

If you get logged in then there's nothing wrong with your credentials. If the login fails then you've got a problem with your username/password or the server thinks you do. If you don't at least connect to the server then you've got some other problem, like a firewall that is blocking port 993.

-Rick
 
Top