Martin wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

Let's be really simple:
- Are you running a program on your computer to look at your e-mails?
If so, what is that e-mail program?

Oulook 2013 (part of Office 365 personal)

Okay, much clearer now. You are running Microsoft Outlook 2013 as a
local e-mail client on your computer to connect it to Microsoft's e-mail
servers to access e-mails in your account using the POP email protocol.

Is this a new problem (the setup was working before and recently stopped
working) or is has this problem always existed from the moment you
installed Outlook 2013 and tried to connect to your e-mail account?
That is, is this a new problem in an old setup that was working before
or is this a a new setup problem and this problem has always been there?

Did you configure the account defined in Outlook 2013 to remember your
login credentials? See:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ou...102809384.aspx

Did you enable the "remember" checkbox in that Outlook's account
definition?

In the logon information you entered in the account defined within
Outlook 2013, did you use your FULL e-mail address as the username? If
your username is "martinmartian", and if the domain for your account is
"outlook.com", then the username you must specify in the account logon
is ", not just "martinmartian". The domain is
required because Microsoft operates e-mail services on several domains
and they need to know under which domain is defined your e-mail account.

The problem with POP (and IMAP) is that they return a very limited set
of status messages. In POP, there are only 2 statuses returned: OK and
ERR. There is no standardization on the comment field that can be
optionally included with the OK and ERR statuses so those comments
cannot be relied upon in a program that is hardcoded to recognize only
some strings, if any, beyond just the OK and ERR status itself. That
means if there is a login failure, the client (MS Outlook 2013) won't
know why there was a failure, only that there was one. So the client
often issues a "login failure" message when that wasn't the error cause
at all.

Did the server return anything useful for the login failure? Go to the
Send/Receive menu tab in the ribbon, click Show Progress, and look at
the Error tab to see if there's any info there about the logon error.

While Outlook (the program, not the Outlook.com site) has a logging
function, it's a bit daunting to figure out (plus Microsoft formats it
like how they like rather than just show the commands and output from
them in the order issued to the server). First let's see if you can
even log into your e-mail account. Load your web browser and visit your
e-mail account that way (i.e., using the webmail UI to your account).
See if you can login as a test that your logon credentials (username and
password) are still valid (i.e., some hacker hasn't changed them). Use
the webmail UI to verify your login is still valid. The username will
be or , not just your
username. That's because the webmail UI accepts logons for multiple
domains: Hotmail.com, Live.com, and Outlook.com. You have to identify
under which domain is defined your account.

See if you can login okay using their webmail UI. That will verify if
teh login credentials still work there. I have run across an
intervening security page that has me enter characters presented in a
CAPTCHA image. They do this to verify a human is using the free account
rather than a spambot. This intervening security page has blocked me
from logging on using a local e-mail client (e.g., MS Outlook) until I
used the webmail UI to get past the security page. This hit me about
twice a year. I don't know if Microsoft is still doing this since it's
been a long time it last happened to me. I had to use the webmail UI to
their e-mail service, login that way, get past the security page,
logoff, and then my local e-mail client worked okay thereafter (until it
happened again). Something else that I've read for other users is that
after logging in using the webmail UI that they see their account is
locked. It has violated Microsoft's terms of use for a free
personal-use account. You may have sent to more recipients per day than
your free personal-use account permits. Last I checked (a couple years
ago), a new account could only send to some limited number of recipients
per day. That was a per-recipient quota (not how many e-mails you sent
but to how many recipients you sent e-mails). Last I heard (I haven't
checked for awhile), and as your reputation goes up so you can send more
e-mails, the quota was 400 recipients per day when using their webmail
UI and 100 recipients per day when connecting using a local e-mail
client. They have other anti-abuse quotas. If you bulk mail out lots
of messages but don't keep your contacts up to date, you end up sending
to recipients that no longer exist (or never existed). This results in
getting NDRs (Non-Delivery Reports) or DSNs (Delivery Status
Notifications), either of which means your e-mail was not deliverable.
As I recall, there is a limit on how many NDRs you can produce per day.
Personal-use users might create a couple a day trying to deliver to
someone who no longer has that account or the sender is using the wrong
e-mail address. It is the spamming and bulk mailing users that generate
tons of NDRs and why their accounts get locked for abuse violation. The
users reported seeing an intervening security page on logon showed their
account was locked (not deleted but just locked). They had to click a
link that took them to a page to request their account get unlocked;
else, I think, they had to wait 24 days from when their account got
locked for it to get unlocked. They violated some anti-abuse quota or
perhaps were reported by others (recipients) as a spam source so their
account got locked. It may also get locked when their account got
hacked and abused by someone else; i.e., a spammer got into their
account and abused it. Microsoft won't know if it's you or a hacker
using an account. They just verify the correct login credentials were
entered to allow use of that account.

See what happens when you use the webmail UI to your account to login.