Hotmail: Errors Retrieving Messages

[Jeff]

Ok, I may have some good news for people that have been sticking with or still wanting to use IMAP (which should cover everyone).

One of the comments on downdetector.com suggested using:
IMAP: outlook.office365.com
SMTP: smtp.office365.com (continue to use smtp-mail.outlook.com)

I have just tested this IMAP server and it works incredibly fast. Not only that, but IDLE appears to be properly implemented, as well.

There may be a caveat to this, however. These servers appear to be for business accounts:
https://support.office.com/en-us/articl ... S&fromAR=1

So even though they apparently work for personal accounts now, I'm apprehensive that they could shut this off.

[burtp]

Good news and bad news:

I'm still running 4.3.
The good news: using outlook.office365.com as the IMAP server works great, no errors and fast
The bad news: using smtp.office365.com as the SMTP server produces this error

Login Error: Auth XOAUTH2
Server Return: (#454)

I re-authorized PP, restarted and it made no difference
Switching back to smtp-mail.outlook.com and all is well again. Maybe 4.4 fixes this. Don't know.

[Jeff]

Confirmed. Looking back, I had tested with a non-oauth2 account originally and the smtp.office365.com server had worked fine. But the new smtp server doesn't support oauth2 even though the corresponding imap server does. Since I haven't seen any issues with the original smtp server, that will be the preferred server.

[Jeff]

A couple of new developments today:

1) There's a new server available:
imap.outlook.com
Simple and clean. It appears to be on the same network as the office365 server (and just as stable), but it has a different IP address.

2) I'm probably going to jinx it, but the original imap server (imap-mail.outlook.com) seems to be much more stable today. I've only had one error today, where normally I'd have about 10 by now. There are other clues suggesting that they've done something, including increasing the inactivity timeout so IDLE can actually be used again.

That being said, the original imap-mail server is still sluggish so I would recommend using one of the other server names (imap.outlook.com) which are much more responsive.