Unable to subscribe to Office 365 IMAP folders from MUA since 2022-11-01

Anonymous
2022-11-02T07:33:01+00:00

I'm using Thunderbird to access my Office 365 mail account and it has been working fine (a couple of month ago I also switched to OAuth2 due to deprecation of basic IMAP authentication). However, since 2022-11-01, Thunderbird is unable to subscribe to IMAP folders. Last time I know it was working was last Friday 2022-10-28. Thunderbird is able to list to available folders (e.g. when opening the "Subscribe" dialog from the mail account settings), but cannot subscribe to them. I enabled IMAP logging in Thunderbird, and it shows that the server answer the subscribe request with "BAD SUBSCRIBE".

It is not a password/authentication issue, as Thunderbird can still see the content of "Inbox" and "Deleted Items". And if I disable the option "Show only subscribed folders", it can access everything in my Office 265 account.

Edit: here's the relevant logs from Thunderbird (note: I've replaced the actual folder name with "xxxx"):

[Parent ...: IMAP]: I/IMAP ...:outlook.office365.com:A:SendData: 76 subscribe "INBOX/xxxx"

[Parent ...: IMAP]: I/IMAP ...:outlook.office365.com:A:CreateNewLineFromSocket: 76 BAD SUBSCRIBE failed.
Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For business | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-01-25T09:28:48+00:00

    Just had a reply. All 1st line seem to have been told is a fix was deployed and I think we'd got that far by ourselves.

    Regarding another IMAP related incident recently affecting at least hundreds of tenants (IPv6 problems which I know some of you encountered too), I was advised I had to raise a Microsoft Premier Support case if I wanted a root cause providing for that incident. I fully expect to be told the same in this case if I try and escalate the lack of satisfactory feedback.

    But this is starting to make sense. A Premier Support case will likely bypass Wicresoft's 1st line and be responded to by Microsoft support people.

    Ours is a non-profit tenant, and even though the lack of feedback is intensely annoying on something I think should have been posted up on Service Health as an advisory anyway, I'm not about to waste charity money on Premier Support cases unless I really have to.

    On a different matter, I notice Microsoft are reporting an incident this morning that has made the national press in the UK, and (see below) it's nice to see this HAS made it on Service Health :) They seem to be indicating some sort of network problem.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-01-24T14:38:55+00:00

    It's working for my accounts now.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-01-24T09:54:04+00:00

    Can confirm; seems to work on my side as well.

    Considering the convoluted cause of the bug, I am not surprised that it took them a while to fix the issue.

    However, what really pisses me off, is that they have refused to officially acknowledge the existence of the issue to this day (e.g. on the admin's Service Health desktop)!

    That is an ominous indicator of the direction in which Microsoft's technical customer support is developing...

    (Admittedly - no surprise there either; most likely human developers have been largely been replaced by search engines and stupid AI by now.)

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-01-24T09:47:21+00:00

    Good news is this morning we found out that the issue got solved without notice.

    We received a message a week ago about Microsoft Support saying they would start to see progress in around 15 days, but the solution came much faster.

    Haven't received yet a confirmation email by them, but the folders seem to work fine in all the users affected and in all tenants.

    Indeed, IMAP finally started working again this morning for me as well. Took them long enough to fix!

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