Can no longer access my hotmail email account via IMAP

Anonymous
2024-01-25T14:52:12+00:00

I have my email client set up to access my hotmail account via IMAP, using the server name "imap-mail.outlook.com" and the smtp server name "smpt.office365.com". It worked without problems until today but today when I suddenly started getting the error message: "login to server imap-mail.outlook.com with username [my email address] has failed." - with the buttons: "Retry/Enter New Password/Cancel".

I can log in to my hotmail account via my browser using the same password that is being rejected when my email client tries to log in via IMAP.

What could be causing this and how can I fix it?

Dave

NB - I don't use outlook but I couldn't find a usegroup for Hotmail so I'm posting herer.

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-01-18T10:42:06+00:00

    I've yet to trawl through all the answers here but I've had the same problem for months on my WIndows 10 PC - password not accepted when trying to sync email - and the only solution was to use live.com in a browser or the God Awful 'New' Outlook

    Today after seeing other peoples attempts to fix the issue I set up 'old' Outlook as the 'administrator' logon and it all worked .... all my email just synced without any issue .... looking at the default mail settings its using Exchange whereas my user account uses IMAP ....

    So the solution would seem to be to go through the process of converting all the email in my IMAP account to using Exchange - and recreating my email account i nthe process - I could just create a new email account but this is my primary one

    The funny thing is that my other hotmail account and my GMAIL which are both still IMAP are working fine

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-01-25T19:01:55+00:00

    I gave up and went to gmail. With gmail you can setup an application password for imap access. When you enable imap access, you add an app name and it generates a long password to connect to using imap protocol. It's so helpful that when you try to connect, you even get a helpful link to how to setup imap connection. Hotmail.. just doesn't work.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-01-26T09:35:47+00:00

    In the end I created a new Outlook profile with new Exchange accounts (instead of IMAP) - Exchange is the default and it re-synced all my email just fine. I then went back and deleted the old account files and the old profile after setting the new one to be the default - Start Outlook with the shift key on to manage profiles - why Microsoft seemed unable to offer such a simple solution is beyond me .....

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