I noticed this morning that accessing Hotmail via POP3 had stopped working - there were no emails in my inbox. The error message was as follows:

Authentication failure: unknown user name or bad password. [Error="ProxyNotAuthenticated" AuthResult=0 Proxy=CY1PR0101MB0939.prod.exchangelabs.com:1995:SSL]

This is a completely misleading message. It's nothing to to with user name or password. And anyway, I hadn't touched either.

I then went to the webmail version of Hotmail, and its appearance has changed (for the worse I might add).

Anyway, I eventually twigged: Microsoft had screwed up the migration, and in the process turned off POP3 access. Muppets!

Anyway, if you have the same problem, go to Settings ("cog"), Mail, Accounts, POP & IMAP and re-enable access there.

Hope this saves somebody a bit of time.

Switch to Gmail, MSN sucks, same as Yahoo.

Thanks for the heads up, changed both my accounts, and yes on both Pop3 was turned off.

My Outlook Mail has been screwed up for about 45 days, ever since they switched Hotmail and Outlook to Exchange Server. My Hotmail inbox and Global Online inbox were working fine and then they were suddenly screwed up. I tried switching to IMAP and then back to POP 3. My desktop Outlook 16 works fine but I just can't get my Outlook Mail straightened out. Mail is delivered to my inbox but the disappears a short time later. Sometimes it shows up in a folder named "POP" and sometimes it doesn't. I've been relying on gmail for the past month.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm pretty sure it's not a screwup but deliberate action.

Microsoft isn't much interested in people using POP3 on the free service.

They can't push ads to you so no revenue.

They probably did this hoping that most users will give up and start using the web mail.

The same thing happened on my Microsoft @live.com and @outlook.com accounts over the last six weeks or so. Happened a couple weeks apart on each account. I could no longer access those accounts via my Outlook email client. So I logged onto my accounts via a browser (no problem accessing that way), went into the settings area of the accounts, saw the pop access had been deactivated, reactivated the pop setting, then my Outlook client could send/receive via those accounts again....no problems since.

MS has apparently been doing some update/upgrade on everyone's accounts over a staggered period and for some reason it sets the pop access from on to off....just reset it to on and all is good again.

Much better to jettison all the proprietary (MS, google etc) free email services and purchase a cheap hosting package including email for around 2500 baht / year. Then you can control your own destiny using the email client of your choice. I used to think that Google search was the Dog's <deleted>...but now it's so intrusive that I don't use anything google.....duckduckgo is my default search engine