How to configure SquirrelMail for @hotmail or @outlook.com accounts?
 

I have a server with SquirrelMail 1.4.22 installed and configured to be accessed by @hotmail.com and @outlook.com accounts.

It is working, but I tried to send a message with my @hotmail.com account and it did not work! I may not have done it before, although I remember to have configured everything, including SMTP settings.

First, it gave a basic error complaining about STARTTLS. Now, its server settings and SMTP settings are:

1. Domain : hotmail.com
2. Invert Time : FALSE
3. Sendmail or SMTP : SMTP

4. SMTP Server : smtp-mail.outlook.com
5. SMTP Port : 587
6. POP before SMTP : FALSE
7. SMTP Authentication : login (with IMAP username and password)
8. Secure SMTP (TLS) : true
9. Header encryption key :

For 7, I have also tried plain instead of login. The error (shown below) is the same.

For a logged in user, when we try to send any message it gives this error:

--
ERROR:
Message not sent. Server replied:

0 Can't open SMTP stream.
--

Just for comparison, the IMAP settings I am using are:

--
4. IMAP Server : imap-mail.outlook.com
5. IMAP Port : 993
6. Authentication type : login
7. Secure IMAP (TLS) : true
8. Server software : other
9. Delimiter : detect
--

How should I configure SMTP here? I cannot find the right values.

To login and read messages, we type the full email address and its password. Nothing to complain about that.

The official settings are these:

IMAP server name imap-mail.outlook.com
IMAP port 993
IMAP encryption method SSL
POP server name pop-mail.outlook.com
POP port 995
POP encryption method SSL
SMTP server name smtp-mail.outlook.com
SMTP port 587
SMTP encryption method TLS

Outlook may want to use STARTTLS. Also, in case you have two-step verification you must use an app password instead of the regular one, but, then, you could not read messages either. You may also want to check the instructions for configuring Squirrelmail.

So my settings seems right? I do not see where the problem is. May you clearly point it?

The SquirrelMail documentation you pointed is not clear for me. I chose version 1.4.22 of SM because it is the last stable version, and I installed it from source. I configure it using the configure script in its root folder, which is pretty easy to use.

Is the STARTTLS error I mentioned above important? It happened when option "8. Secure SMTP (TLS)" was set to false, which I considered a basic error and simply changed it, not worrying to write the error message I had. But then the situation is like I described.

My impression is that SquirrelMail 1.4.x does not support STARTTLS. Can you shift to 1.5.x? Outlook or Hotmail uses STARTTLS in my version according to the Outlook.com webmail site.

Is there a way I can confirm that limitation of SM 1.4.22? If someone could point something to do that, would be great.

I can use newer versions of SM. The reason why I chose 1.4.22 is the "stable" word attached to it, and lacking in all newer versions. I was in SM users mailing list for sometime, but it feels mostly abandoned. I also have made a few small changes in SM (nothing relevant as a contribution to the project, just a few "silly tricks") that would need to be tracked and (possibly) moved/adapted to the newer code to use.

Well, if nobody suggest a way to confirm the 1.4.22 limitation in a few days, I will consider that it does not work with STARTTLS, which seems to be necessary for Microsoft mail accounts today.

The web link I referred to above says that: 'SquirrelMail is able to connect to IMAP and SMTP servers that use TLS. Since 1.5.1 version SquirrelMail is able to connect to IMAP and SMTP servers that use STARTTLS (which is different from TLS)'.

Saying that 1.5.1 does it should not mean that 1.4.22 does not. The project just has bad things, then. Lastest stable version does not do some basic things. Lastest development version is more than 10 years old! And I have met people who said that SquirrelMail is very bad, that it had several problems with their server and caused several problems for their users, and that is the reason why they changed the webmail client they used, this relieved them a lot. I know the opposite case too, but they probably fixed a few things, since they do not have the problems I am going through.

And I did not know that STARTTLS is different from TLS. This also was not clear, the names are similar and I imagined that there was no problem - wrong, ok.

Do you know any other FOSS webmail client that does not depend on javascript to work? This is basically the big reason for me to choose SM.

Unfortunately it means that none of the 1.4.x versions supports STARTTLS. Using proprietary webmail only (outlook.com, gmail.com), I have not much experience of other FOSS webmail solutions, but there is a fairly recent review, '5 open source alternatives to Gmail', which may be helpful; it does not address javascript dependencies, however.

Thank you! I will read that review (:

Only today I am coming back to this problem (that was kept waiting without a practical fix). I did:

0. renamed the old install folder to something else to use the "good folder name" with the newer (and futurely completely working! (: ) install

1. since I am not choosing the "apparently right" stable version, I was unsure how I should choose from the newer versions. I downloaded
squirrelmail-20170510_0200-SVN.devel.tar.bz2 , but if my choice for the current dev. version is bad, please point me a specific better one (saying why it is, please)

2. downloaded the last translation data available (it says "it *should* be compatible with newer versions). It is a lot older, but... its name:

squirrelmail/all_locales-1.5.1-20060409.tar.bz2

3. I ran the ./configure script for my older install (which works but does not send), comparing each setting and copying all of them. The only few that differ are the IMAP/SMTP settings, for which I was prepared to use STARTTLS instead of the other secure settings.

4. php.ini and .htaccess files adjusted where needed (copying what is needed from the files in the older folder(s) )

Well, I felt it was ready to try the first access. But it did *not* work! ):

"What could be wrong?", I thought. The IMAP/SMTP, probably (what else could be? Nothing, I guess).

After a minute (or so) of loading, it gave this error, with nothing else in the page:

And a second try now (repeating the error for no reason) gave me a different error:

Well... I decided to go to the given "official settings page" and adjust it from there - you won't believe it: it is *not* using STARTTLS anymore! It mentions just SSL and port "993/587" for both IMAP and SMTP server! It changed what we have seen before, mentioning STARTTLS, it does not now! /-: (...)

The first thing I will do (and report in a future post) is to change my settings accordingly and try to use it again. Right?

But would this mean I could use the older (and preferred) SM? Just trying it to see if it works? Or any of you know that?

There are no options in SM mentioning SSL (as I wish, since it is mentioned in the official settings). So I changed its settings to:

4. IMAP Server : imap-mail.outlook.com
5. IMAP Port : 993
6. Authentication type : login
7. Secure IMAP (TLS) : TLS
8. Server software : other
9. Delimiter : detect

4. SMTP Server : smtp-mail.outlook.com
5. SMTP Port : 587
6. POP before SMTP : false
7. SMTP Authentication : none
8. Secure SMTP (TLS) : TLS

With these settings, I accessed an email account (great, it can read messages!! (: ), composed a message with two attachments and tried to send it. Did not work, gave the error:

==
ERROR
Message not sent.

Server replied: 0 Can't open SMTP stream.
==

Without closing that user session, I changed SM settings for SMTP only, just changing Secure SMTP to STARTTLS instead of TLS:

4. SMTP Server : smtp-mail.outlook.com
5. SMTP Port : 587
6. POP before SMTP : false
7. SMTP Authentication : none
8. Secure SMTP (TLS) : STARTTLS
9. Header encryption key :

By trying to send that ready message, the error changed to:

==
Message not sent.
Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Server replied: 550 5.7.3 Requested action aborted; user not authenticated
==

Ideas? Does this mean my settings are partially right? Or should I go back to that TLS error and solve it from there?

Chosen languages are not working. Why?
 

I changed the default language to pt_BR and default encoding to UTF-8 (should not matter for all languages but English).

The account I tried to received this default, but it does *not* use this language! The texts are in English! I tried to change its preference to another language, refreshed pages, did not work. Changed back to pt_BR, refreshed again, still does not work. ):

What is wrong here? Please help me finding it!

Changed the SMTP authentication to "login" (quote about it: "should be better, if I can"). Message sent!

Lets try better options...

digest-md5:

==
ERROR
Message not sent.
Command parameter not implemented
Server replied: 504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type
==

cram-md5, same error:

==
ERROR
Message not sent.
Command parameter not implemented
Server replied: 504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type
==

plain:

also worked!

Which should I choose? ./configure writes them like this:

login - Plaintext. If you can do better, you probably should.
plain - SASL PLAIN. Plaintext. If you can do better, you probably should.

Are these too bad? I will be using plain until someone says it is...

I am making several posts with different questions. Do not forget a previous one if a person answer something for only one of them! I will mark this thread as solved (probably) only when all of them are answered.

This post's main part it to say that I changed (in my server config!) the Trash, Sent and Drafts folders from "INBOX.*" to, respectively, "Deleted", "Sent" and "Drafts", respectively. These are the folders that has use signs in this account. I discovered this when I checked and saw that the only 3 messages in INBOX.Sent were my test messages! Should this be mentioned in that official documentation page? Should it be mentioned in SM's (and all other clients') documentation? (I would say yes for both)

After changing these server settings, I went to the open account page to move the messages I have sent... they were there, but when I moved them it gave the error "messages not moved because folder does not exist". "Huh?!!!", I thought, thinking they were lost by an untold deletion of the "wrong" folders I changed. /-: This was a bad automatic, IMO, but I found that the messages were in the good sent folder, together with all the others. Not so bad, then. I am just unsure of what happened: did I move the messages? Or they were automatically moved when (or as consequence of) the folder settings changed? (: Anyway, I still had to manually delete a few "INBOX.something" empty folders.

Themes...
 

The 1.4.22 had more themes than 1.5.2dev has (and we need to ask their detection in the server settings!).

And my 1.4.22 used a modified theme that would be great if I could reuse it as it is there...