MFA with Office 365 App Password will stop working randomly
Hi All!
We are using the latest thunderbird client to POP3 from Office 365 with Multi Factor Authentication enabled. We are aware that application passwords are needed for thunderbird to work with a MFA O365 account, so we created a new, unique app password specifically for thunderbird to access the mailbox. However, different users experience different types of failure: 1. Some would suddenly fail to send email, with thunderbird saying password is wrong and asking for the password 2. Some would suddenly fail to receive email, also with thunderbird claiming wrong password 3. The time for this to happen is completely random. Some users experience this after 30 mins of using the app password, some actually managed to use it for fifty something days before the problem pops up again 4. If the user go and generate a new app password, it will work and the cycle begins again. The failure time is still random, for example the 5x day person re-generated a new app password, and within hours it failed again. After another regeneration, it is still going fine at this moment (5 days so far)
Would really want to know whether others are experiencing this. I have consulted Office 365 support and they are trying to say it is a problem at thunderbird's end. Grateful if anyone could advise, thank you for your time and help!
所有回复 (3)
Just to elaborate, when you change Office 365 app password, do you delete the old one in TB before being prompted for the new one? Tools/Options/Security/Passwords/Saved Passwords. Also, it may be necessary to delete the old one from the O365 admin centre.
Hi!
Thank you for your reply. We did not deliberately tried deleting the old passwords before. However, this problem also affected us at the start when we first setup thunderbird. In other words, all our accounts were setup and done (with passwords changed in O365 first), then we download thunderbird and setup a new profile for them. So there are pretty much no old passwords to start with. Hopefully this answers the question.
Thank you again for reading.
I have seen a number of issues raised by folk about ther whole application password thing in outlook /hotmail specifically. I have not see any real solutions, but my guesses are. 1. Disable anti virus cscanning/ phshing scanning and any other mail scanning you may have installed.
2. Do not use a VPN in connection to the Microsoft sites. They appear to get antsy when you keep connecting from a difference city or continent depending on where the random VPN endpoint is located. I have had similar issues with Google. They are quite sensitive to geo location when connecting.