Your settings should work, according to their instructions. Check that the User name is the part of your address before the @, not the full address. Also, disable any antivirus program, if it exists, while you set up the account (and disable email scanning by the AV once the account is established).

I am aware that the settings should work; for some reason TB is not communicating properly with the mail server when using SSL. I didn't try setting up an account as you suggested but I used the mail account setup tool, which queries the mail server using the given parameters. I did turn off anti-virus while doing this and still no success.

If you let TB query the mail server, it isn't guaranteed to find the right settings. Better to use Manual config. (as the UVic instructions suggest), and enter directly. Or, select File/Offline/Work Offline to bypass the account setup wizard server query.

Hi, the mail account setup tool does allow manual configuration. I use it because the turnaround time for a response, failed or otherwise, is faster. If the tool successfully connects then it may overwrite the settings, but in this case it doesn't get that far. I'm just curious if anyone else has encountered this problem so that I can start looking in the right direction.

Right now I'm looking at various clients (openssl, different versions of telnet) that I could use to manually test the connection. I'm also trying to VPN into the server first but even that is running into problems. These all seem to point to a basic connectivity issue involving SSL and/or certificates.

If you have a VPN running while trying to set up the account, that is a likely cause of failure. Even if you can establish the account, VPNs cause problems, especially with sending. Make sure you can access the account through webmail to confirm the credentials.

Hi sfhowes, I tried turning off anti-virus (AVG Free) but that wasn't enough so I rebooted Windows in safe mode. Still had the problem.

I ran openssl and saw that there was no SSL certificate for that imap mail server, however there is one for imap-mail.outlook.com and I have no problem accessing the outlook SSL imap mail server with Thunderbird.

So this seems to be independent of Thunderbird and is probably not a Mozilla support question anymore. However it still might be of interest to Thunderbird users who try to setup an SSL imap mail account while running certain brands of AV. Assuming the problem is with my computer and not with the mail server, the only difference between the two imap accounts is that I setup the outlook imap account before installing AVG.

The next obvious test is to uninstall AVG and retry setting up an imap mail account with SSL.