TB suddenly stopped connecting to Outlook
I use Outlook through a GoDaddy business account and never had a problem with OL connecting to TB on the laptop until 4/6/23 when all of a sudden, while trying to send, a message popped up: "Login to server smtp.office365.com with username ... failed" and "Sending of the message failed. Unable to authenticate to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp.office365.com. Please check the password and verify the 'Authentication method' in 'Account Settings | Outgoing server (SMTP)" The authentication method is "Normal password" so I tried the password associated with this account (I have 4 email accounts) at GD, this did not work. Since OL is a Microsoft product, I also tried the password associated with my MS account, to no avail either. Finally, I get the TP message: "Server outlook.office365.com has disconnected. The server may have have gone down or there may be a network problem."
So I did the following: I called GoDaddy and after a lengthy discussion, was finally told that, because OL is working when I access it through GD and it is also working on my mobile devices, it had to be an issue between TB and OL and that I should contact MS and TB.
I then contacted MS support via chat (65 minutes total!) and was finally told that "outlook has an issue now and it's a BUG" and "Just to inform, we are aware of this concern. Currently, there's number of customers who are affected of this issue. Our research engineers are currently working on this. Rest assured, we are doing our best to get everything up an running the soonest. " and finally "Are you contacting TB? I consulted our higher support for your concern and you also have to contact TB for this."
I'm essentially at my wits' end.. I don't think that the problem is at GD because OL for which I have signed up works fine on all the devices. It's something between OL and TB and since OL does not seem to know if this sudden connection failure is an issue of the OL server I'm connected to, I hope that someone in the TB community knows what's going on.
Any advice is greatly appreciated, I have used TB for years and really like it and would hate to have to be relegated to using OL online :(
All Replies (3)
Aegeri1046 said
I called GoDaddy and after a lengthy discussion, was finally told that, because OL is working when I access it through GD and it is also working on my mobile devices, it had to be an issue between TB and OL and that I should contact MS and TB.
I think I have the same problem. After more than a year of trouble-free use, TB suddenly became unable to connect to my GoDaddy Office365 email accounts on or about April 7th. TB is still able to connect to my Gmail and an IMAP account that I have.
I too called GoDaddy email support. I was told that Microsoft Office365 (of which GoDaddy is a "reseller") has been in the process of switching server types (to "Exchange" I think but I'm not sure). Anyway, the GD guy said "free" Thunderbird is no longer compatible with the servers. He mentioned something about a "pay" version of TB that is compatible. Perhaps he meant a "pay" add-on for TB?
Caution, take the above with a grain of salt as the minutia of email servers, clients, exchanges, etc is lost on me.
Anyway, I switched over to Outlook desktop client as it came with Office 2021 that I purchased. It's able to connect with my MS and non-MS accounts.
Modified by gfvalvo
gfvalvo, thank you for your response, your GD support person had more info than mine as I was not told that MS Office365 is changing from Outlook to Exchange servers, or whatever :)
So I did a bit more research and found out that there is an add-on specifically developed to connect Exchange servers to TB https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-exchange/ the website is https://www.beonex.com/owl/ the organization is based in Germany
I downloaded the add-on (it requires an annual license fee of about $11 per account), there are 2 setup options, automatic and manual. I did 2 accounts manually and 2 using the automatic option: - The manually setup accounts could receive and send messages but while the sent messages were received by the recipient, they were not copied to the sent folder and were not synced with the OL online accounts.
Note that the server type on TB is listed as owl-ews
- The accounts created automatically at this time work fine, messages are received and sent correctly and the sent messages are copied to the sent folder and everything syncs accurately with the online OL accounts.
Note that the server type on TB is listed as owl
- I then re-set up the 2 manual accounts automatically and at this time, they are working correctly.
The one problem that I am now having is that I have several non-working accounts on TB: - the 4 original IMAP accounts that stopped working on 4/7/23 and: - the 2 manually set up accounts with the owl-ews server type plus one duplicate account that I don't know how it got there :) for a total of 3 While the 4 original accounts are completely non-operational, the 3 owl-ews accounts all receive messages sent to the the working owl accounts
I am hesitant to delete any of these redundant accounts as I don't know if deleting one would delete all and I would lose all the data. I used the original IMAP accounts to set up the owl supported accounts so if I were to delete the owl-ews accounts, would this: - delete the working owl accounts and also delete the original IMAP accounts?
I sent an email to owl.support@beonex.com on 4/12/23 but have not yet heard back from them. Hence, if anyone is familiar with the account deletion process on TB, I would very much appreciate their advice.
I heard back from Owl support yesterday and their reply solved the problem of the non and partially working accounts:
"You can delete any of these accounts without any repercussions. Deleting one will not delete all the others. P.S. Since Owl 1.0.2, you do not need to use EWS for additional accounts. Owl 1.0.2 supports multiple Exchange accounts on the same server via OWA. Please try EWS or EAS, only if it fails with OWA."
I hope that my experience with Microsoft Office365 Outlook email accounts abrupt change to Exchange servers and the subsequent solutions to get TB working again will help others you have encountered the same problems.