This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Thunderbird stopped sending/receiving emails today from 3 of 20+ outlook.com accounts

more options

Hi, I have been using Thunderbird for about a year with 20 outlook.com accounts and a couple of others. Today it stopped being able to send and receive from 3 of the outlook.com accounts with the message 'Mail server responded: Logon failure: unknown user name or password.'

The username and password work fine in webmail and on my phone so the message can't be literally true. The other 17 outlook.com accounts work fine in Thunderbird so it can't be a server setting change at the outlook.com end nor any general issue in Thunderbird. I've removed and recreated the passwords in Thunderbird so it can't be corruption of the password table. I have Thunderbird on 2 computers, exactly the same setup, no problems until today, same issue on both machines today with the same 3 accounts, so it can't be any other corruption at the Thunderbird client end.

So now I'm stuck - the above seem to eliminate everything :-(.

Does anyone have any kind suggestions please?

Thanks and kind regards.

Hi, I have been using Thunderbird for about a year with 20 outlook.com accounts and a couple of others. Today it stopped being able to send and receive from 3 of the outlook.com accounts with the message 'Mail server responded: Logon failure: unknown user name or password.' The username and password work fine in webmail and on my phone so the message can't be literally true. The other 17 outlook.com accounts work fine in Thunderbird so it can't be a server setting change at the outlook.com end nor any general issue in Thunderbird. I've removed and recreated the passwords in Thunderbird so it can't be corruption of the password table. I have Thunderbird on 2 computers, exactly the same setup, no problems until today, same issue on both machines today with the same 3 accounts, so it can't be any other corruption at the Thunderbird client end. So now I'm stuck - the above seem to eliminate everything :-(. Does anyone have any kind suggestions please? Thanks and kind regards.

Chosen solution

What?! Thanks Nereus. I tried again this afternoon and 2 of the 3 of mine that didn't work magically did. Just tried again and the 3rd one magically works too.

I wonder what caused this 3-day 'outage'? All I can think of is maybe something on some of Microsoft's physical servers that just happened to have those accounts on them. Wierd.

Oh well, thanks for reading and sharing this episode folks :-)

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (4)

more options

My problem is similar - my wife's outlook account works fine, but mine will not get incoming emails. Sending of outgoing emails works fine, so it can't be a username OR password problem. I've changed nothing, except for updating TBird to 78.6.1 today.

more options

Hi, I also tried removing and re-adding one of the accounts that stopped working. Thunderbird reported that it couldn't as the server wasn't found in that configuration and perhaps the email provider had changed the configuration. Yet 17 other accounts with the same outlook.com provider and same settings still work fine, as did the 3 that have stopped, until a few days ago.

more options

My problem has magically corrected itself! I have made no changes since my previous post, and today I started getting all the emails on TBird that I could not get yesterday. A mystery to me, as nothing has changed...

more options

Chosen Solution

What?! Thanks Nereus. I tried again this afternoon and 2 of the 3 of mine that didn't work magically did. Just tried again and the 3rd one magically works too.

I wonder what caused this 3-day 'outage'? All I can think of is maybe something on some of Microsoft's physical servers that just happened to have those accounts on them. Wierd.

Oh well, thanks for reading and sharing this episode folks :-)