Help needed to repair wife's emails in Outlook 365

[#1]

Hello everyone,

My wife and I  have used Office 365 Outlook as a mail server on our Windows 11 home computer for several years.  We have separate mailboxes.  Because we both pick up emails on IoS mobile devices, we use IMAP.   My mailbox syncs and loads new emails correctly on the home computer, but my wife’s has stopped displaying new emails since the end of October.  Outgoing emails and the IoS devices are unaffected.

I have tried deleting and reinstalling her account, but no joy.  The send/receive and syncing indications at the bottom of the screen show activity for a while, but then disappear without any incoming emails being loaded.  There are no emails shown in Inbox, just a message saying  ‘We  didn’t find anything to show here’.

The only folders listed are Inbox and Outbox.

Unfortunately I followed advice on Microsoft’s community site and deleted the cache, and this has resulted in losing all emails from Outlook without correcting the problem and these haven’t returned, so that presumably accounts for no emails at all showing .

I’m using the following mailbox settings:

Incoming          imap.plus.net, port 993

                                Encryption SSL/TLS

                                Requires logon

Outgoing           relay.plus.net, port 25

                                Encryption STARTTLS

                                Logon not required

                                Outgoing server requires authentication

                                Use same settings as incoming mail server

User name (domain name + wife’s name) and password are correct – they are the same as used on the IoS devices.

I would be eternally grateful if someone could suggest where I’m going wrong.

Many thanks,  Dave

[#2]

Hi Dave,

Assuming that the Outlook clinet is NOT reporting a connection issue, I suspect that this is a simple issue to fix - in the email account settings, set the IMAP root folder path to inbox

Note in passing. the out going server should be relay.plus.net port 587 STARTTLS.

Also the details you referenced for the SMTP server are either confused or mistyped (or did you mean SPA logon not required?) - logon IS required ...

[#3]

HI Townman, many thanks for your prompt reply.  I did mean that in outgoing mail, logon using SPA is not required; is this correct?

My own mailbox uses outgoing port 25 with no issues; I think I've tried 587 in the past without success.  Either way, I've changed my wife's to 587 and have my fingers crossed.  I believe you have said in another thread that IMAP takes a while to load; would the fact that all her incoming emails are missing  (all 1500 of them) slow things down?

Dave

[#4]

Hi Dave,

Port 25 is technically for MX to MX message relay, whereas port 587 is for email client message submission.  Some networks prohibit access to port 25 from client devices.

Yes, it the mailbox is large, then it could take a while to down load.  The key question is do you see the sent / draft / trash folders in Outlook?  For some (as yet inexplicable) reason some IMAP connections need the root folder specifying to see the content of the inbox and the other folders.  It might be helpful to extend the server time outs to two minutes.

I have known a new mailbox configuration to take a few hours to sync a large mailbox.

[#5]

Thanks Townman,

I've extended the server timeouts to 2 minutes.

I'm away now until late Sunday (snow notwithstanding) so I'll report back on Monday.

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Many, many thanks Townman: adding the inbox path and extending the server timeout has done the trick! all the wife's emails are back, all folders are back and new emails are arriving. I tried changing the outgoing port to 587 with no joy; as soon as I changed it back to 25, all emails suddenly appeared - in the words of Private Eye, trebles all round!

The outgoing port thing may be due to a setting in Windows Defender, but I don't have the skill set to go poking around in there.

Thanks again,

Dave