This week an exception in Outlook spam filter caused a large number of users’ mailboxes to fill up with spam emails, and now Outlook is again down, with an exception in Outlook’s IMAP service causing clients like Gmail to fail to sync emails.
Initially users found that Gmail was unable to sync Outlook emails and speculated that there was a problem with Google servers, Google then started investigating and flagged the issue on its status page.
As the investigation progressed Google found that only Outlook and Hotmail mailboxes could not be synchronized, and only the IMAP protocol was affected, while other protocols were not affected.
After contacting Microsoft, Microsoft admitted that besides Gmail, other mail clients are also unable to synchronize Outlook emails using IMAP protocol, so this time the problem is not with Gmail but with Microsoft’s Outlook again.
Microsoft hasn’t updated the information on the status page yet, because Outlook.com is running normally, but the IMAP protocol is not synchronized by other clients.
Google is waiting for Microsoft’s reply, and Google’s engineering team says Microsoft is studying the problem, but it’s not clear when it will be restored.