I use Thunderbird 17.0 to access my Office 365 Online email account. It frequently but not always fails the login with an error "Login to server pod51010.outlook.com failed." Note that if I retry later, sometimes it will work. I do this on my laptop connected to various networks and get the same results (intermittent success), so I don't believe it is network related. I also have thunderbird installed on a desktop and get the same results from that computer. Furthermore, if I do the login manually using:
openssl s_client -crlf -connect pod51010.outlook.com:993
from a cygwin command prompt, and then manually enter the IMAP login command, e.g.:
a01 login myusername@contoso.com my_password
I get the same random, intermittent successes and failures. This tells me that it is NOT a thunderbird issue but rather a Microsoft imap server issue. I need a support engineer to examine the login logs to determine what the nature of the login failure is.
Note that I never have login failures when I use the Outlook Web application.
Thanks!
Richard Bass
Core Supplement Technologies, Inc.