Day 52: IMAP and Outlook

Microsoft, the future of email

So the mbox work was successful, but unfortunately before the tutorial can be completed we need to actually set up Thunderbird to use the new Outlook 365 mail system. Steve did mention I document doing this as another of my tasks, but I completely forgot - so I set about doing it today. It proved impossible.

Now so far I have been logging into the new Outlook mail system directly via the student portal. This involved logging into the portal, and then clicking the "EMAIL" button, which took me directly to my Outlook 365 inbox. There was no actual login screen for Outlook itself.

So that's all well and good, but when I tried to access the outlook web app directly and log in, no combination of username or password would work. The point of the new change, as Steve explained, is so that everything will use a single username and password. And that would be the Central University one, i.e. the 8 character ID every member of the University has, starting "mba_____" or something similar and it's corresponding password.

Well the Outlook web app login page does not like firstname.lastname@student.manchester.ac.uk, nor does it like the 8_digit_central_ID@student.manchester.ac.uk. There is currently no way to access that mail account other than logging into the Student Portal (i.e. MyManchester) and going via there.

The problem with this is that I do not have a username or password to give to Thunderbird to have it fetch my Outlook mail. From within the Outlook 365 web app, you can view the IMAP settings (server hostname, port, SSL etc). It also tells me that my ID is muhammad.mahmud@student.manchester.ac.uk. Now within Thunderbird I have set up the IMAP and SMTP settings correctly (it tells me all as well and even told me that it found port 23 on the SMTP to be a good 'un so that seems to be working), but when it attempts to verify username and password it simply fails.

So in a nutshell, I don't know my Outlook 365 username and password!

For one thing, I understand that the University does not want students to be able to change their Outlook password from within Outlook 365 itself at any time, because then that won't sync with their university password which will cause all sorts of problems. But I need some way of knowing my Outlook login credentials so that I can bypass the University Student Portal and get my mail forwarded to Thunderbird.

Another interesting occurrence, student portal now no longer logs me in to my Outlook account because I've entered the password incorrectly too many times - now it comes up with the captcha screen (input these characters to prove you aren't a robot) where it also requires me to type my password again. But I don't know my password, because Student Portal was handling all that automatically! So there is no way for me to get into that account until Outlook resets itself. Actually I can just use another browser, but the point remains!

AR
Fixed a few bugs, now sound is correctly re-enabling itself when switching back to a model set from another model set whilst the marker card is still in view throughout. I think the sound system is pretty much done! Only thing to do now is to find more sounds and add more sounds. Working on the bouncing golf balls, intend to program them so that the balls make the bounce sound when any ball bounces. Should be realistic and fun!