Outlook for Mac

Outlook 2011 (Mac): IMAP “Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.”

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Older post from April 16, 2014. Details may be out of date.

Question asked on Apr 16, 2014

After configuring Outlook 2011 (Mac) to access two IMAP accounts hosted by my hosting provider (Dreamhost) AND Outlook is able to access the account,, after a little while I will constantly get notified with the following:

The server for account "<account name>" returned the error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password." Your username/password or security settings may be incorrect. Would you like to try re-entering your password?

It turns out that Outlook is disabling the authentication settings on the outgoing server - changing my setting from 'Use Incoming Server Info' to 'None'.

I seriously doubt this is a Mac problem seeing as how the Outlook account configuration is an Outlook responsibility.

Once I corrected the changes,  the messages stop. However, they do reappear from time to time.

I know Outlook is a 'champ' with Exchange, but this kind of carelessness, on the part of Microsoft, is a reminder of whom Microsoft is looking after and it isn't the consumer.

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

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