Hotmail POP3 Password Authentication Failed

[Grim Revenant]

Thanks for the helpful thread! If this helps anyone else: a 20 char password was too long, but 16 chars works just fine for me.

[supdowg]

Hi all,

im getting the same error but ive been using hotmail on thunderbird trouble free for some months, same settings, same username and password and its always worked absolutely fine until the past couple of days.

Now every time i start TB or press the 'Get mail' button i get the error:

Code: Select all

"Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server pop3.live.com responded: authentication failed"

After ok'ing this dialogue box i get another with a choice of retry, which when clicked logs me into the account fine and my mail is downloaded. Never happened before now.

Smells like a bug?

[supdowg]

What the hell!
Just started up TB when it went into update mode, presumably to 3.1.4, now as well as the problem stated above i cant SEND email.

An error occurred sending mail: The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: Cannot connect to SMTP server xx.xx.xxx.xxx (xx.xx.xxx.xxx:25), connect error 10061.

Why the hells my email screwed itself up over the past couple of days? It worked absolutely fine now its gone into self destruct mode! Whats the crack!!

[Neutralizor]

Using TB 3.1.4 I had this issue arise when trying to add a Hotmail account which (originally) had a 21 character password. Using a condensed pw with 16 characters I was able to get it working however 16 appears to be the maximum as 21 down to 17 were all tried with log/relog pw changes in Hotmail itself and then updating TB with the new pw each time.

This issue does not appear to be consistent- When I first installed TB I setup my gmail account with the same 21 character pw as I was using on my Hotmail acct and it worked and is still working fine.

Not being that tech savvy I can only conclude that either Hotmail doesn't support passwords greater than 16 characters in length from Thunderbird specifically (I previously had Outlook working with Hotmail and a 21 char pw) and this may be due to some background recognition protocols I am unaware of...
or
Thunderbird has some kind of limitation/restriction on the total length of passwords that it can store and somehow my having entered such a long pw in my gmail account had used this up (this is unlikely given the consistency of other posts reporting the 16 char limit).

So it looks like it's most likely the usual problem of communication between client and server or the software installed thereon. It'd be nice to see an admin with a definitive answer to this i.e: "I can confirm that Microsoft is mean and has implementd the MSFU protocol on its servers which won't let us play with more than 16 character passwords" or something like that

Still great software and great community support so thanks to all the devs and admins... don't ever let the trolls get ya down

[neutralizor]

Just to add I also experienced this same issue with previous TB versions but hadn't experimented with rectifying it til installing 3.1.4 today. Have to say I can live with it even if it is a bug as this version works just how I like it out of the box. Open source rocks!

[omaro2]

i've got the same problem, around a week i didn't get any new mail and it make an error on the password or username because of the pop3.live.com server. Both on my ipod touch "mail" application, or on the one of my macbook, what's the problem???
it worked very good until last week! i can't check my e-mails even my password and my adress are correct!

[Daifne]

If it's failing on your IPod and on your computer, then I would strongly suspect problems on the Hotmail side. They have recently made some major changes and we have seen numerous problems with sending, at least since.