Problems with outlook.com accounts XOAUTH login using IMAP in eM Client 8.2

UPDATE: Microsoft has fixed the problem on September 30th.

On September 24th, 2021 Microsft made some changes on their mail servers, which disabled OAuth login for the IMAP protocol on their accounts. Unfortunately, this affected all outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, msn.com and other free Microsoft account domains in our program, since we used this secure login method as default.
You can tell if your account is affected by a red triangle shown next to your account name. This account also cannot receive any new messages.

We have reported the issue to Microsoft and are working on a more permanent workaround to this issue, but in the meantime, the only way around this issue is to set up the account anew manually, so a direct login is used instead of the OAuth method.

  • Go to Menu>Accounts.
  • Click “Add Account” and select Mail>Other option.
  • Insert your outlook.com account address and then select IMAP.
  • Insert these settings for Incoming and Outgoing server:
    imap-mail.outlook.com
    smtp-mail.outlook.com
  • User your email as username and your password.
    If you use 2-factor verification, you will need to create and use an App password for eM Client instead.
  • Finish the setup according to your own preferences.

This set up will only work for email, not for contacts and calendar. For that you can keep the AirSync service active on the old setup and disable the IMAP/SMTP ones to avoid seeing the connection warnings.

If you use any security apps (AVG, Avast,…) they might detect this less secure connection to the Microsoft server as possibly dangerous and block it. In such case, you need to either add eM Client to exceptions or disable any mail shields in the meantime until either Microsoft resolves the OAuth issue or we release a version with a workaround.

We are sorry for any inconvenience.