Outlook 2013 keeps asking for my outlook.com password

This old school setup worked for me. For now, anyway. In Outlook 2013, go to

-> File -> Account Settings -> (remove your account first, in order to re-create it)

-> New

-> Manual setup (bottom left radio button option)

-> Next

-> POP or IMAP

-> Next

-> enter 'Your name' & 'Email'

-> Account Type: choose IMAP from the drop-down

settings info as of this posting (https://www.getmailspring.com/setup/access-hotmail-com-via-imap-smtp)

-> incoming mail server outlook.office365.com

-> SMTP outgoing server imap.office365.com

-> User name : [your complete email address] IMPORTANT - the system will auto-fill with your user name and delete the '@outlook.com', but this only works with your FULL EMAIL ADDRESS in the "User Name" field

-> enter your password

-> bottom right MORE SETTINGS

-> tab: Outgoing Server: click on checkbox "My outgoing server requires authentication)

-> tab: Advanced: Incoming server IMAP: SSL 993

-> tab: Advanced: Outgoing server SMTP: TLS 587

-> OK

-> Next

Now, you should get the "Test Account Settings" popup and (for me), both tests pass.

If your OUTGOING test (the second one) doesn't pass, ensure that you entered your full email address in the outgoing settings under "User Name" (see IMPORTANT above) and check your password.

I hope this helps someone. I love Outlook 2013, and have tried all the new versions and hated them all for various reasons.

1. The app password is temporary. It will still ask it after a while for some reason. So quite useless.
2. I have other e-mails too, but I like to keep them separate - that is why I have them separately from the beginning. But I understand your point. The e-mail in that sense is functioning and it is an issue between Outlook 2013 and Microsoft/Outlook.com .
3. This is what I'm doing at the moment =) - but this is not a solution in that sense. This is just coping with the situation, which isn't the way it is supposed to be.

I've done that too. Actually, I don't even know, what causes it and what is actually going on in the background, because it is not very ... umm ... stable?

Right now, every time I turn on my PC and open Outlook, then at first, it wouldn't even open up withou either closing the popup or entering the app password from Microsoft.com. More often I have started to ignore it and just close it from the X. It will show on the bottom status bar that I need to enter a password, but after a while, new e-mails start loading up and it kind of looks like functioning. And that is what I have started to do - ignoring the "Need password" message and it works as strange as it seems.

Another workaround that seems to help temporarily is entering an incorrect password once when the repeated prompts to sign in appear, without ticking the box to remember the password, and then entering the correct password and ticking the box to remember. Apparently the wrong password changes or resets something behind the scenes or in the inner workings (possibly because of a different error code being returned) that makes the correct password stick. Worth a try for those of you who are still being prompted repeatedly.

I had this same issue begin at the end of January 2024. It was coincident with a Windows 11 update the one that installed AI, so I thought the update had caused the problem. I re-imaged with Macrium, back to my pre-update Operating System, and the issue remained.

I logged onto my Windows 8.1 computer, which I had not used in months, and which had never had the problem, and found the same issue with Outlook 2013 there. So my conclusion is, it is not an Operating System problem, but it is an Outlook.Com problem.

I conclude the solution is either to:

1. Get and Application password login credential from Outlook.Com.
2. Get another web based email account, to use with Outlook 2013, and forward all your Outlook.com mail through there.
3. Just deal with the popups, on my computer, it doesn't seem to happen much once I've started Outlook, unless I shutdown or something.

Just a note, it took me days to figure this out, I actually originally had reimaged only the Operating System partition to start with, and was trying to figure out how the problem could still be under my E:\Working Files, User Profile, App Data folder, before I made a new image of my current files, and imaged back to previous image of December 2023, to find the problem remained.