Solved Thunderbird/Outlook/Office365 Email

Hi.
I am making this enquiry on behalf of a friend who has little understanding of computers and the like and so I might therefore be a little short of accurate data, but this is how I understand the problem.

My friend has several email accounts which she administers through Thunderbird on a laptop Win 10 platform. One of these email accounts is a BT Business email account which has the tag @btconnect.com. Following some recent problems with sending and receiving on this account, it has been reconfigured with the help of BT (with numerous password changes) to an account that now appears to be accessible only through Office 365/Outlook. Attempts to alter the account settings in Thunderbird fail to recognise the User Name/Password combination as do attempts to set up a New Account in both Thunderbird and Outlook (used in stand alone mode). The only access that works is one through Firefox/Office 365/Outlook. Office 365 immediately recognises the User and demands no further authentication, allowing subsequent clicking on the Outlook tab and thence into the email.
"https://outlook.office.com/owa/?realm=btconnect.com etc."
This indicates to me that the password has been entered previously at the Office 365 prompt and "remembered". My friend is fairly sure that the current password that she has written down is the correct one but I have no way of checking this.

My friend would dearly like to have this @btconnect.com email account working again within Thunderbird. Any ideas about what might be wrong and/or how to overcome the problem would be appreciated.

 

Thanks DaveA.
She cannot access via Thunderbird OR Outlook. Outlook only works if accessed by going through MSOffice first. I think that you are correct in that it is a password problem of sorts. My suspicion is that her password for MSOffice has somehow become her email password; that might explain why Thunderbird doesn't work anymore but doesn't explain why trying to use Outlook on its own does not (unless she has a different p/word for MSOffice and the one she thinks is her email password is no longer valid).
I will get her to try as you suggest and take it from there.

 

Terry: I don't know if that is the case. She has other "domestic" BT Email accounts which work fine in Thunderbird; it is just the "business email" that has recently posed a problem. I think "something that BT did", but don't know what. The BT fix was to do it through MSOffice. See below to DaveA

DaveA: If she starts Outlook from the desktop then it opens as standalone (like Thunderbird), but she cannot set it up to look at her email. If she starts MSOffice, it opens in Firefox and one of the icons on the start page is for Outlook. If she clicks on that Outlook icon then Outlook opens within Firefox and she can read her email.

All new to me. Duh!

 

DaveA: I did not say that she used an icon to start MSOffice, only that she "starts it" and in retrospect I think that it must be the realm Outlook.office.com that she links to (An easy "office" confusion for the non IT literate). It is visible within Firefox and so I assume that she is browsing to some form of "MSOffice". The address in the Firefox window is https://outlook.office.com/owa/?realm=btconnect.com as I posted in the first post so it is outlook.office.com. I shall be visiting her tomorrow and can take a closer look at what BT have had her do.

 

Hi.
I have spent a couple of hours with my friend today, trying to solve this problem with the assistance of BT. The short answer is that the email @connect.com could be accessed either via Outlook (using an office server address) or via https://outlook.office.com/owa/?realm=btconnect.com but not via Thunderbird. Neither I nor the BT "assistant" could get Thunderbird to connect. The repeated Thunderbird error was a time out. My conclusion is that this is either a genuine Thunderbird failure or might be a deliberate exclusion of Thunderbird by Microsoft, or perhaps both. I intend to have a look at some of the Mozilla forums but if, in the meantime, anyone has a known fix then please do let me know.
P.S. The Thunderbird connection to @btinternet.com works fine, just not the one to the @bt.connect address which now appears to be "behind" outlook.office.com

 

An ominous silence from the Thunderbird forums and no further responses here and so I have set her up with a new email account with a non BT provider and which Thunderbird can access. She will have to persevere with the additional tedious outlook.office.com step until she has time to migrate all her @btconnect.com emails to the new email account. Consequently, I will mark this as "solved", even although the original problem persists.
Negative points for BT and Microsoft!!

 

Couriant: Hi. I don't think that there is any two factor authentication operating. When she logs into the account via Firefox, only the email password is requested. I can only surmise that somehow the @btconnect.com account is "hidden" behind the outlook.office.com server and Thunderbird cannot get past that. I imagine that Conspiracy Theorists might argue that it is a stitch-up between BT and Microsoft!

 

Hi Curiant.

My recollection is that the server details are correct as above, but I would need to pay her another visit to be absolutely sure. I don't know if she has access to the Admin Centre. I'll drop her an email and if she has not already migrated to the alternative at gmx.com might give it another go. If it is indeed a two step authentication process, where would she find the "first" step? At present, she only has (uses) the email password.