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Office365 IMAP: "user is authenticated but not connected"

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Recently, Thunderbird has started throwing errors when I try to connect to my Office365 account via IMAP. The error is persistent when it starts to occur, but doesn't occur every time I connect. It only seems to be related to message retrieval, because sending works fine via the Office365 SMTP interface, although slow.

The error says: "user is authenticated but not connected"

This only happens with Thunderbird 60.8.0 (64-bit) on a Ubuntu derivative. I haven't tried other platforms/versions, but I have a number of other IMAP clients that work just fine with Office365 (eg. AquaMail on Android and others), and this started recently .. after an upgrade of Thunderbird.

Here's a link to someone having a very similar problem, who contacted Microsoft help and got nowhere.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/imap-is-not-working-correctly-on-outlook-office365/ab51cf7d-5b39-48dd-81a1-7f8dd5a91a17?page=1

Any help?

Recently, Thunderbird has started throwing errors when I try to connect to my Office365 account via IMAP. The error is persistent when it starts to occur, but doesn't occur every time I connect. It only seems to be related to message retrieval, because sending works fine via the Office365 SMTP interface, although slow. The error says: "user is authenticated but not connected" This only happens with Thunderbird 60.8.0 (64-bit) on a Ubuntu derivative. I haven't tried other platforms/versions, but I have a number of other IMAP clients that work just fine with Office365 (eg. AquaMail on Android and others), and this started recently .. after an upgrade of Thunderbird. Here's a link to someone having a very similar problem, who contacted Microsoft help and got nowhere. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/imap-is-not-working-correctly-on-outlook-office365/ab51cf7d-5b39-48dd-81a1-7f8dd5a91a17?page=1 Any help?

All Replies (4)

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I googled the error because I have no idea. The first thing that came up was https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/164823/user-is-authenticated-but-not-connected-after-changing-my-exchange-password

Have you tried deleting the password in Thunderbird? Edit> preferences > Security > passwords so it can be requested?

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Hi Matt.

Thanks for the response and suggestion.

Unfortunately, I've tried the "delete your password" approach, which shows up on a few related Googles, and it doesn't work. I've also tried different entry-points for the IMAP server (eg. "aim at a specific box"), which shows up on a related thread from a guy in Australia. I've also tried the "reduce server load" approach by limiting the number of connections. None of these things work. <heavy sigh>

I'm hoping that I don't have to go to the point of deleting and/or reinstalling my Thunderbird profile or Thunderbird itself .. but that may be the next thing I try.

It's really frustrating.

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deleting Thunderbird will be entirely pointless creation of work in my opinion. The issue is with the server.

Do you have one of those moronic anti virus programs that hides a password vault full of incorrect passwords somewhere. Norton's used to and it was not alone. I try and avoid Norton's in any way I can so I have no idea of the current status of that product.

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Agreed about the delete/reinstall, but the issue seems to be with the IMAP client ... not directly the server.

I have several other IMAP clients that don't exhibit this problem, just Thunderbird on Linux. I'm currently checking to see if it happens with Thunderbird on Windows.

It may be a combination of corner-case errors that the client brings out in the server, whereas the other clients are "more tolerant" or "less compliant." Not sure.

The server / network issue ("authenticated but not connected") seems pretty common with Office365, though, and seems to be happening *after* authentication completes, so difficult for me to blame on a latent password problem ... but who knows?

Brain really hurts.