Email app passwords · Outlook.com Outlook.com app passwords
Outlook.com app passwords
no longer work.
Microsoft app passwords no longer work for email. Basic authentication — which is what an app password is — was switched off for personal Outlook.com accounts on 16 September 2024, so a mail app can only connect through a modern OAuth sign-in.
Applies to outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, msn.com addresses.
Step by step
What to do instead.
- Don't create an app password for mail — it will be rejected regardless of what Microsoft's app-password help page implies.
- Instead, add the account in a mail app that supports modern authentication (OAuth), such as BlueMail: choose Outlook/Microsoft as the account type and sign in on Microsoft's own page.
- If your app asks for servers, they are
outlook.office365.com(IMAP 993, POP 995) andsmtp-mail.outlook.com(SMTP 587, STARTTLS) — but all three now require OAuth, not a password.
Worth knowing
- Microsoft's app-password documentation is still online and still says it applies to Microsoft accounts. It hasn't been updated for the mail deprecation, which is why so many guides still send people there. App passwords remain usable for a few non-mail devices, just not for IMAP, POP or SMTP.
- This affects @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com addresses alike.
- POP is switched off by default on Outlook.com and has to be enabled in the web settings before any client can use it.
- The outgoing server differs from the incoming one:
smtp-mail.outlook.comis the personal host —smtp.office365.comis for business Microsoft 365 accounts.
The easy way to add Outlook.com
BlueMail signs in to Outlook.com through the provider's own login screen, the same way your browser does — so there's no code to generate, copy or replace later, and nothing breaks the next time you change your password. Free on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux.
Download BlueMailThese steps follow Outlook.com's own documentation. Official guide →
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