Exchange IMAP "BAD User is authenticated but not connected"

[Richard Lewis]

Hi there,

My university switched to Office 365 some time ago. I've noticed
various annoyances with the IMAP implementation which I think I've
asked about here before.

The latest one is that I intermittently get this error message:

"BAD User is authenticated but not connected"

when attempting to connect to the server. The connection is not
successful.

Of course, we have a helpdesk and when I asked them they decided it
must be something do with my client caching an incorrect password. I'm
not very convinced about this. For one thing, I've never supplied
offlineimap with an incorrect password.

But does anyone know if it's even possible that offlineimap *could*
cache a password, correct or not?

My previous problem with O365 IMAP has been that it appears to
throttle connection speeds. It used to intermittently refuse to
authenticate when I was on my university's ethernet network (with ping
time to the server of <10ms) but was always successful on wifi
networks or my home ADSL. I'm wondering whether this newer error
message may be another maifestation of the same problem?

(I've noticed this error message mentioned on the Web as being
described as a security bug (because you can take advantage of it to
brute force username/password guessing I think). But it's also
mentioned that it was fixed years ago.)

Thanks,
Richard