PSOT: problems accessing hotmail account

[Woody]

Greetings,

I have been using Opera Mail to access two gmail and one hotmail
accounts for some time. Suddenly the hotmail.co.uk account persistently
comes back as (confirmed as) password error. The two gmail accounts
still work correctly, and I am can access my hotmail account through
webmail with the same username and password.

I have tried loading the hotmail account into Thunderbird and Windows
Live Mail and get the same error and have also it loaded in the Gmail
prog on my phone and K9Mail on my tablet and they too report incorrect
password.

But the same username and passwords work on the hotmail webmail site.

Phone and tablet are Android (V7.0 and 4.4.2 respectively) and my
desktop is Windows 10 Pro fully updated.

Anyone any bright ideas as its beginning to annoy me!

[Martin Brown]

I have seen something similar with a different ISP which turned out to
be that they had changed the guidelines for an acceptable secure PW and
the one I had chosen no longer met the new specification. This only got
flagged as an error when trying to establish an SMTP connection and gave
no error at all logging in via their webmail (at least didn't on the day
when the mail client baulked at connecting with password error).

My instinct is to change the password for the hotmail account and hope
that resets whatever has gone wrong with it. Hopefully it might even
tell you that the existing password is no longer compliant.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Graham J]

You might find that Hotmail has chnaged the way they allow an email
client to connect. Gmail actually has a similar arrangement - you have
to set up a further level of authentication using their management page
before you can connect with an email client - but webmail still works,
although possibly you have to use 2FA whenever you log into their Webmail.

I don't use either so I can't give you full details.


--
Graham J

[Woody]

On Tue 12/01/2021 15:17, Graham J wrote:
> Woody wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I have been using Opera Mail to access two gmail and one hotmail
>> accounts for some time. Suddenly the hotmail.co.uk account
>> persistently comes back as (confirmed as) password error. The two
>> gmail accounts still work correctly, and I am can access my hotmail
>> account through webmail with the same username and password.
>>
>> I have tried loading the hotmail account into Thunderbird and Windows
>> Live Mail and get the same error and have also it loaded in the Gmail
>> prog on my phone and K9Mail on my tablet and they too report incorrect
>> password.
>>
>> But the same username and passwords work on the hotmail webmail site.
>>
>> Phone and tablet are Android (V7.0 and 4.4.2 respectively) and my
>> desktop is Windows 10 Pro fully updated.
>>
>> Anyone any bright ideas as its beginning to annoy me!
>

Looks like the combination of these replies may be the cause.

I prefer to run my mail clients in Pop3 mode so that all mails are
retained on my machine (not that I ever delete them off my ISPs server!)
I tried a different mail client and let it load up by default in IMAP
and bingo it all worked. I then went back into Opera Mail and created a
new account in the same username and password and let it install in IMAP
format and bingo it all worked. Not only that the IMAP version also
recovered all of the emails sent or received in my original POP3
installation, so after checking I was able to delete the original POP3
account.

What I still don't understand is why this has changed when it worked OK
in POP3 last week. Out of interest my Opera Mail also has two Gmail
addresses installed in POP3 mode and they have continued to work
perfectly. I must therefore assume it is M$ beggering about again!