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
    2022-11-15T12:35:22+00:00

    Still not fixed for me :(

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-11-15T10:55:52+00:00

    Seems like this was just fixed (at least for me). The only other thing I did before I finally got my folders back was starting Thunderbird with debug-output to better investigate the problem and having it running in the background for a few minutes.

    MOZ_LOG=IMAP:4 thunderbird

    P.s: Nothing fixed here - I just accidentally activated the workaround (see Mark Nagle's Post from December 4.).

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-11-14T12:55:03+00:00

    I've just chased Microsoft on the back of my support ticket, but I'm not expecting a rapid resolution to it, given there is a workaround available to display all folders.

    Remember too that the number of users and O365 tenants affected is going to be a small percentage of the overall O365 service - simply because most corporate users of O365 will have users on Outlook accessing with the standard Microsoft connection protocol MAPI, and not IMAP. None of my Outlook users are affected by this issue for that very reason - and it was Thunderbird using IMAP where the problem first surfaced for me.

    All I can suggest is those of you who manage O365 tenants open your own support ticket in Admin Centre so Microsoft can at least see who is affected. By all means cross-refer to mine which is ticket ref. 33661676

    If you are an end user and certain you are seeing this exact same issue, then maybe contact your service desk/O365 sys admin and ask them to do the same.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-11-14T08:56:24+00:00

    Any news on this ? It's been 2 weeks with this issue and it's getting frustrating...

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-11-10T03:11:55+00:00

    Great detective work! Thanks. Now there's hope of a MS 'fix'.

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