I was referred to this forum for solution to my long standing problem of my account not syncing contacts with either my laptop not my iphone or ipad. Please see below a full description of the issue I have written for another Microsoft forum. My sense is that my account is at fault. Ideally, I would not like to change account (I.e. change email address), so hopefully someone might help!

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Here is a complete description of my set-up and the issues:

I have a desktop running windows 8, a laptop running windows 8.1 an iphone and an ipad. I have a back-up file of my contacts in .pst format (currently 502 contacts in total). I use this file in order to populate my contacts into my various machines,

I use my desktop as my base machine.

- I have created an email account in Outlook in my desktop.

- I have added the data file containing my contacts

- I have copied and pasted my contacts from the .pst file into my email contacts.

- Following this my contacts in my email account show 502 contacts

I would expect that this would sync with my Outlook.com account on the web

When I go to outlook.com under people, and I check I find that 3 contacts are missing i.e. it shows 499 contacts

- Then I have created the same email account onto my laptop.

- I would expect that those 499 contacts will download to my laptop. Instead my laptop, shows 241 contacts only. When sorting the contacts, it appears that the sync stops roughly in the middle of the alphabet!

Checking my iphone / ipad email accounts they show 0 (zero) contacts. I have deleted and re-created the email account into iphone/ipad several times with the same result. I have re-created the account using either the Exchange and Hotmail option - the result is the same - 0 contacts

Here are some side notes for you to consider:

 - I purchased the Office 365 license a few moths back. Initially I had syncing problems only with my laptop - the syncing with iphone / ipad was OK.

 - following obviously changes made by you people, the sync problem was resolved even for my laptop i.e. everything (desktop, outlook.com, laptop, iphone/ipad) was in sync and working fine.

- A couple of months ago, I suddenly see ALL my contacts disappearing from my desktop and laptop as well as iphone and ipad. I reimported them into desktop via my back up .pst file, however the result I described above.

- On top I get, recently very frequent "disconnects" on my Outlook 2013 in desktop and laptop.

- When I right click on the outlook icon on the right hand side of the windows bottom bar, and I choose "Connection Status...", I see that under "Authn" (I assume Authentication), there is "Error" - I don't know the significance of this!

- Yesterday I went ahead and created a completely new Microsoft account with new email address and I added it to all my machines. I copy pasted from my pst file the contacts to my outlook desktop, following exactly the same procedure as in my old email account. The result was that EVERYTHING, including outlook.com, laptop, iphone / ipad had synced the 502 contacts!

- A last point - when I right click the outlook icon and check the "Connection Status" I see that my old email is tied to "dub-m.hotmail.com" server, while the new one I created yesterday, to "blu-m.hotmail.com". Both accounts under Authn show "Error".