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Unable to subscribe to Office 365 IMAP folders from MUA since 2022-11-01
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Anonymous
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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106 answers
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Anonymous
2023-01-24T14:38:55+00:00 -
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(Admittedly - no surprise there either; most likely human developers have been largely been replaced by search engines and stupid AI by now.)
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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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Anonymous
2023-01-24T08:42:51+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.
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Anonymous
2023-01-17T09:57:20+00:00 Thank you for mentioning the Thunderbird workaround!
I was contacted by Microsoft support who claimed that IMAP is no longer supported since Jan 1 2023. I cannot find any mention of it online, perhaps the representative was refering to IMAP Basic Auth being deprecated. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-deprecation-in-exchange-online-september/ba-p/3609437
Basic auth over IMAP was turned off in October (around the 3rd Oct on my tenant). But it was possible for system admins to re-enable basic auth for individual protocols on their tenants until a final deadline of the start of January - which is where Microsoft's incorrect/mis-leading reply probably stems from.