Move your email from Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com to FranklyMail
No importer can do this for you — Microsoft turned off password access to IMAP and nobody, including Microsoft support, can turn it back on. Thunderbird can, because it signs in the way a browser does. Here is that route, with the one setting that decides whether it still works next month.
Which password Microsoft 365 / Outlook.com wants
There is none. Connecting to outlook.office365.com on port 993 returns LOGINDISABLED — the server declining a password before one is offered — and app passwords went with it. Microsoft’s documentation states Basic authentication is disabled in all tenants and that neither you nor Microsoft support can re-enable it. This is not a FranklyMail limitation and no tool of any vendor can work around it.
Getting it, step by step.
Written against Microsoft 365 / Outlook.com's current screens — the words in quotes are the words on the buttons.
- 1
If this is a personal Outlook.com address, switch IMAP on first: Settings → Mail → Forwarding and IMAP, and turn on "Let devices and apps use IMAP".
Microsoft has IMAP off by default on personal accounts. On a work tenant an administrator does the equivalent instead, with Set-CASMailbox -ImapEnabled $true.
- 2
Install Mozilla Thunderbird. It is free, and it is the piece that can sign in to Microsoft on your behalf.
- 3
Add your Microsoft account: Menu → New Account → Email. Leave the password field empty.
Thunderbird does not need a password here. It will open a Microsoft sign-in window instead.
- 4
When it offers to set the account up as Exchange, refuse. Choose "Configure manually" and set the protocol to IMAP.
This is the most important step on the page. Thunderbird now prefers Exchange, and Microsoft begins switching Exchange Web Services off in October 2026 and finishes in April 2027. An account set up that way will work today and stop working shortly.
- 5
Use outlook.office365.com, port 993, SSL/TLS, with authentication set to OAuth2. Then finish, and sign in through the Microsoft window that appears.
- 6
Add your FranklyMail mailbox to the same copy of Thunderbird as an ordinary IMAP account, using the settings from our setup guides.
- 7
Open a Microsoft folder, select everything with Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on a Mac), then right-click and choose "Copy To" and pick the matching FranklyMail folder. Repeat per folder.
Copying rather than moving leaves the Microsoft copy untouched, which is what you want until you are sure.
What goes wrong with Microsoft 365 / Outlook.com.
- On a work or school account the sign-in window may say "Need admin approval". Thunderbird then has to be approved by your administrator once for the whole organisation — it is a standard consent, not a special arrangement.
- Do not bother with a PST export. Microsoft’s own export path now routes through desktop Outlook and produces a file that Thunderbird cannot read, so it adds a step and loses you nothing but time.
- IMAP itself was never retired at Microsoft — only password authentication was. That is why Thunderbird works over the same protocol our importer cannot use.
- If some people in your organisation can do this and others cannot, it is Conditional Access policy rather than anything about the mailbox.
Then the part that is the same for everyone.
Getting the password is the only step that differs by provider. The order of the move, what does and does not come across, and the one decision that stops you ending up with two copies of every message are on the main migration page.
How the move worksMoving from somewhere else?
$9/yr, and your archive comes with you.
Unlimited mailboxes and aliases on your own domain, 10 GB pooled across the account, 30 days to change your mind.