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My Thunderbird Quit working this morning. Apparent OAUTH2 Problem.

thejerrybryan
thejerrybryan
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Windows 10. Thunderbird 115.7.0 32-bit. Email address is at hotmail.com, so it's an old account that's now at outlook.com This is a personal email account not related to any business nor to Office 365 or anything like that. I have had the account for decades.

Thunderbird quit working with my hotmail account this morning. It goes into an Invalid Password Loop, even when I respond with the correct password. I can logon to my hotmail account just fine with a browser. It's just not the same positive user experience as using Thunderbird.

I'm sure the problem must have to do with OAUTH2.

The outgoing SMTP server is outlook.com Server name is imap-mail.outlook.com Port is 993 Connection security is SSL/TLS Authentication method is Normal Password

Changing Authentication method to OAuth2 does not solve the problem. Instead I get a popup error message that's very hard to capture that is to the effect that "The imap server imap-mail.outlook.com does not support the selected authentication message". It's like I need to use a different imap server. I found one site that said to use outlook.office365.com but I don't really use office365. I may give that a try anyway.

I don't see any other account settings that seem relevant

Windows 10. Thunderbird 115.7.0 32-bit. Email address is at hotmail.com, so it's an old account that's now at outlook.com This is a personal email account not related to any business nor to Office 365 or anything like that. I have had the account for decades. Thunderbird quit working with my hotmail account this morning. It goes into an Invalid Password Loop, even when I respond with the correct password. I can logon to my hotmail account just fine with a browser. It's just not the same positive user experience as using Thunderbird. I'm sure the problem must have to do with OAUTH2. The outgoing SMTP server is outlook.com Server name is imap-mail.outlook.com Port is 993 Connection security is SSL/TLS Authentication method is Normal Password Changing Authentication method to OAuth2 does not solve the problem. Instead I get a popup error message that's very hard to capture that is to the effect that "The imap server imap-mail.outlook.com does not support the selected authentication message". It's like I need to use a different imap server. I found one site that said to use outlook.office365.com but I don't really use office365. I may give that a try anyway. I don't see any other account settings that seem relevant

Chosen solution

Changing the imap server to outlook.office365.com did seem to work (sort of). The only problem seems to be that many of my folders were not there in Thunderbird after making the change.

So what I did was to logon directly to outlook.com with a browser. The folders were all still there from this viewpoint. So while in the browser, I manually moved every single email message back into the inbox. I am now logged in successfully from Thunderbird via outlook.office365.com and OAuth2. It should now be pretty easy to reestablish my folders and move the messages back into the desired folders.

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All Replies (3)

thejerrybryan
thejerrybryan Question owner
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Chosen Solution

Changing the imap server to outlook.office365.com did seem to work (sort of). The only problem seems to be that many of my folders were not there in Thunderbird after making the change.

So what I did was to logon directly to outlook.com with a browser. The folders were all still there from this viewpoint. So while in the browser, I manually moved every single email message back into the inbox. I am now logged in successfully from Thunderbird via outlook.office365.com and OAuth2. It should now be pretty easy to reestablish my folders and move the messages back into the desired folders.

sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Did you right-click the account in the Folder Pane, Subscribe..., Refresh, to see if the missing folders just needed to be subscribed?

thejerrybryan
thejerrybryan Question owner
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I don't remember if I tried that or not. With the wisdom of hindsight, I suspect it might have worked.

But I'm satisfied with my temporary solution of moving all the emails to the main inbox while logged on to outlook.com through a browser. I'm re-establishing the folders and the filters and all the emails are quickly moving back to the folder where they belong.