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When you check (or send) email, email programs such as Outlook connect to your mail server and present it with your account ID and password. If you can’t log in to the web interface because it says your password is wrong, it’s not your mail program that’s at fault here you have bigger problems. Repeatedly asking for and rejecting your password is often the first symptom of an account hack. Either you’ve forgotten your actual password, or someone changed your password while you weren’t looking. If you attempt to log in to your email account using the web interface, and you’re absolutely certain your email address and password have been entered correctly, but you still can’t log in, your password is not what you think it is. If you suspect your account has been hacked and that the hacker has changed your password, proceed immediately to this article for the next steps you need to take: Email Hacked? 7 Things You Need to Do NOW. Until you do, Outlook keeps asking for password because Google keeps telling it the login failed. You either need to use one of the alternatives above or turn on the Google feature to allow login from “less secure apps”. By default, you can’t sign in using a desktop email program with just a username and password. Gmail, for example, considers traditional username/password authentication from email programs to be “ less secure“.
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Services with increased security can cause itĮven if your account doesn’t have two-factor enabled, it’s possible that your email provider is forcing the use of app passwords or OAUTH wherever possible. If you use two-factor authentication on your account (as you should), you may need to check with your email provider to see if it supports either of the two approaches above. That interaction can then support two-factor authentication and return a security token that Outlook can use in the future to indicate you’ve properly authenticated. For example, rather than storing your password, Outlook might have you interact directly with Google to authenticate your Gmail account. OAUTH: This is a technology allowing the email program to hand off authorization to the service.You use it when logging into a program or service unable to support two-factor authentication.
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An app password is generated for you by the email service.
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The most common cause is specifying an incorrect password.
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