My outlook.com account died today. It refuses to accept my password. Without a fix, I think we’re stuck using a different app or the web interface for Microsoft email accounts now.
Hey folks, thanks for reporting this – It looks like you’re correct. Microsoft recently started requiring “Modern Authentication” for Outlook accounts, and I hadn’t noticed because our test accounts are grandfathered in in some way. I created a new Outlook.com account and I see the same issue you’re reporting, and I’m unable to create a new app password.
Could you try going to Preferences > Accounts and clicking “Add Account”, and connecting your Outlook account using the “Office 365” option? (You don’t have to unlink your account first.) Mailspring already uses modern authentication for Office 365, and at least for my test account, that seems to work fine for Outlook now. They may finally be merging these services together under the hood!
If that works, please let me know. Reading through their developer documentation, I think that we can merge the Outlook and Office365 options completely.
Thanks for giving that a spin @mischkl, it’s interesting it gave that particular error and not something more descriptive - I’ll do a bit more testing and see if I can sort out what’s going on. I think that this is impacting specifically Exchange Online accounts (Deprecation of Basic authentication in Exchange Online | Microsoft Learn), but the “instructions for app developers” shown on that page (Authenticate an IMAP, POP or SMTP connection using OAuth | Microsoft Learn) link to the steps we already implement for Office 365, and refer to “Office 365” and not “Outlook” or “Exchange Online”, which is super confusing.
Hm, well FWIW I don’t have Exchange Online, at least as far as I know - I’ve got a basic, free, live.com e-mail account that I’ve had now for something like 18 years. But maybe it’s using Exchange behind the scenes? In any case I never connected via the Exchange protocol up to now, only via IMAP.