Outlook.com IMAP Settings

IMAP keeps your mail on Microsoft's servers and mirrors it to every device you connect. Read a message on your phone and it shows as read on your laptop; move it to a folder and the folder appears everywhere. That synchronisation is the point, and it is why IMAP is the right choice for almost everyone connecting Outlook.com to a mail client.

Outlook.com IMAP settings

These cover incoming mail only — you will also need outgoing settings before you can send. Our SMTP settings guide has those, and the combined settings guide has everything on one page.

The same values apply to @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com addresses. They are all the same service.

Yes, that hostname is correct

Plenty of people see outlook.office365.com, conclude they have been given business settings by mistake, and go looking for a "proper" consumer server that does not exist.

Personal Outlook.com mailboxes run on the same infrastructure as Microsoft's business service. The hostname reflects the platform, not your account type. If you have a personal address, this is the server you want.

Your password may not be enough

This is the most common reason a correctly configured account still will not connect.

Microsoft retired basic authentication for Outlook.com — the arrangement where an application connects using just a username and password. Clients now sign in through Microsoft itself, which issues a limited token and never handles your password. Anything that cannot do that is refused, no matter how correct your settings are.

The signs: the error 535 5.7.139, a password prompt that reappears endlessly, or a setup that worked for years and stopped without you changing anything.

The test takes a second. When you add the account, a compatible client opens a Microsoft sign-in page in a browser window. One that asks for your password in its own dialogue box is using the retired method and will fail. Our security guide covers this in more detail, including the confusing state of app passwords.

Adding the account

Most clients follow the same shape. Open your account settings, choose to add an account, and enter your address.

Many modern clients recognise an Outlook.com address and configure everything automatically, redirecting you to Microsoft to sign in. When that happens, let it — automatic setup using modern sign-in is better than manual settings using the old method.

If you do configure manually, pick the advanced or "other" option rather than letting the client guess, and check it has selected IMAP rather than POP3. Automatic detection occasionally chooses POP, which downloads and removes server copies — a client that has quietly deleted your mail from the server is a far worse problem than a few extra fields to fill in.

What changes once you connect

Focused Inbox disappears

This surprises people, and it is not a fault.

Focused and Other are not IMAP folders — they are a feature of Microsoft's own Outlook apps. A third-party mail client sees one inbox containing everything, because that is what actually exists on the server.

If you rely on the split, either keep using the Outlook app on that device, or accept a single inbox and use your client's own rules to sort mail. Nothing has been lost; the feature simply is not visible to software that does not implement it.

Folders behave predictably

Unlike Gmail, Outlook.com has genuine folders rather than labels, so a message lives in exactly one place and moving it in your client moves it everywhere. That makes it considerably more predictable over IMAP than Gmail — no duplicate messages, no All Mail folder, no deleting that does not delete.

Do still check that your client maps Sent, Drafts, Trash and Junk to the server's equivalents. Wrong mapping produces sent messages appearing twice, or drafts vanishing when you switch device. Confirm it once at setup rather than wondering later.

Decide how much to keep locally

Most clients let you choose between synchronising everything and keeping only recent mail. Full sync gives offline access and fast local search at the cost of disk space; recent-only keeps a laptop light but needs a connection for older mail. Neither affects what is stored on the server, and it can be changed later.

If it will not connect

• Check how your client signs in — a Microsoft page in a browser, not a password box in the app. This is the most common cause by a distance.

• Check the port and encryption pairing. Port 993 expects SSL/TLS; pairing it with STARTTLS fails even though both values look correct alone.

• Check the username is your full address, including the domain.

• Check whether you are actually on a business account. If your address is on a company or school domain, an administrator may have disabled protocol access entirely, in which case no settings will work.

• Try another network if the connection times out rather than being refused — some restricted networks block mail ports outright.

If the client connects but messages are not arriving, that is a different problem. Our troubleshooting guide covers storage, Focused Inbox, rules and blocked senders — and one of those causes bounces incoming mail back to senders permanently, so it is worth reading sooner rather than later.