Jtdcftul

I've noticed in recent months that the ability to send and receive emails has been rather sluggish, or just downright failing. Initially, I've used thunderbird, but I thought I'd try a command line client and installed mutt. Here are the current symptoms:

In thunderbird:

• When clicking on any mailbox other than Inbox (Drafts, Sent, Junk, Deleted), the loading icon in the top tab shows. However, the icon seems to remain there permanently, suggesting that nothing is happening. This has been confirmed by logging in via the web browser, only to find, for instance, email in the Junk folder. However, the Inbox seems to load just fine. The same symptoms are shown on a second account I have with the same service.




• Attempting to send an email yields similar results, except that after a few minutes, I receive an error that sending the email has failed

In mutt:

• Upon starting the software, the status shows "Connecting to outlook.office365.com" for a few minutes, before finally loading the inbox.




• Sending an email takes several minutes, but unlike thunderbird, it actually gets sent.




• I rebound G in .muttrc to run the command imap-fetch-mail, as it was doing it for POP by default. When I use this command after sending a test email to myself, the email shows up in my inbox within seconds. Not sure why this works, yet it takes so long to initially connect when starting mutt.




• Uncertain of how other mailboxes react. Still new to mutt, so I don't know how to view Junk, Sent, or Deleted yet. Please comment if you know what I should be doing.

The question here is what is causing this sluggish response, and how do I fix it? It used to work perfectly, until one day when it didn't. I haven't changed the configuration on thunderbird in any way, and even if I needed to update it, the configuration in mutt is new, yet still doing this.

Account settings in thunderbird:

Server Name: imap-mail.outlook.com

Port: 993

User Name: email.hotmail.com

Connection Security: SSL/TLS

Authentication method: Normal password

SMTP:

Server Name: smtp-mail.outlook.com

Port: 587

User Name: email.hotmail.com

Authentication Method: Normal password

Connection Security: STARTTLS

Contents of ~/.muttrc:

set ssl_starttls=yes

set ssl_force_tls=yes

set imap_user = 'email@hotmail.com'

set imap_pass = 'password'

set from= $imap_user

set use_from=yes

set realname='name'

set folder = imaps://outlook.office365.com:993

set spoolfile = "+INBOX"

set postponed="+[hotmail]/Drafts"

set mail_check = 100

set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers"

set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies"

set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates"

set smtp_url = "smtp://$imap_user@smtp.office365.com:587"

set smtp_pass = $imap_pass

set move = no

set imap_keepalive = 900

set record="+Sent"

bind index G imap-fetch-mail

Note that Server Name in thunderbird is different to set folder in mutt. Both suffer from the slow response times, but they both get me my emails eventually. The SMTP server is different between the two configurations as well. I have not yet tested thunderbird with the newer server configuration to see if it solves the issue of failing to send emails, but the main issue of this question is just in regards to the amount of time it takes to accomplish certain tasks.

Further details:

• mutt version 1.10.1




• thunderbird version 60.6.1




• Ubuntu 18.10