How to properly setup your Outlook.com account to connect to GoDaddy POP based email Servers.

Last Updated 2/6/2017

As of 11/28/2016 and after about 9 long months Microsoft’s new Outlook.com online email can finally connect up to GoDaddy POP based accounts.  I'm not sure if GoDaddy or Microsoft finally resolved it but my support case was active since July and I even went so far as to configure an email account on the server for Microsoft to test with and it still took over 4 months to resolve.

Around February 2, 2017 Outlook.com finally started deleting the emails off our GoDaddy account finally.  Again at least a little progress helps.

Also please note that Microsoft does not push out updates to all Outlook.com users at once.  They have multiple forests and it goes out one at a time I guess with a delay between for quality assurance.  Which apparently is very low at Microsoft with all of the bugs I have found in Outlook.com.

When the new Outlook.com was forced on users one of the 40+ bugs I found was that Outlook.com was the only email system in the worked that could not connect to the GoDaddy POP based emails servers we use and you would get an error like "The POP server doesn't support features needed to download email." if you manually setup your connected account or if you automatically did the setup then Outlook.com would try to configure it as an IMAP account instead of POP.

So the good news is that POP based email now works for GoDaddy users from my testing on my Outlook.com server forest.

The Bad news is they still have 4 huge bugs which make Outlook.com still unusable for many people so you will have to choose for yourself if it's worth moving to Outlook.com.
1.) Rules do not work even after deleting all existing rules and creating new ones either manually or through the Move command rule creation.
2.) Certain images do not show up in the emails still and worse is now they don't even show the outline box so that you know an image is missing. They show up in the Outlook iPhone app, Yahoo, GoDaddy Web Email, and everything else but not in the Outlook.com web client.
3.) Certain files cannot be downloaded. Again they can be downloaded from everything else but in Outlook.com you can only save them to your OneDrive and then download them from their to your desktop.
4.) Microsoft still can't get it through their heads that they have to retrieve messages from your connected accounts when you refresh the page or give you a button to do it. If a client sends an email or if you do a password reset on a website you can't wait 30 minutes for them to retrieve it on their next refresh cycle. I did find a workaround for this sometimes where you can send yourself and email and it should trigger fetching the emails from your connected accounts server.

So here is the crystal clear steps to reproduce the problem. 

1.)    First verify that your email on GoDaddy is a POP based email.  Visit https://sso.secureserver.net/?realm=pass&app=emailsetup and make sure that it lists you incoming server as pop.secureserver.net

 

2.)    Go to Outlook.com and log in.  Then in the upper right click on the Settings wheel and then the Connected Accounts.  Now add a connected account using the "Other email accounts" option. 

3.)    VERY IMPORTANT HERE IS TO MAKE SURE YOU PUT IN THE WRONG PASSWORD AT THIS STEP.  If you put in the correct password then Outlook.com will incorrectly configure it as IMAP for you incoming server and it will act like it works but if will never download your emails.

4.)    Next select the POP Connection Settings

5.)    Now fill in the various information making sure both the Email address and the User name is the same email address you are trying to connect to.  HERE YOU DO NEED TO PUT IN THE CORRECT PASSWORD BECAUSE YOU NEED TO MANUALLY ADD THE SETTINGS FOR IT TO WORK. The remaining of the settings you will find in the GoDaddy Email Setup center but the secure settings in orange are what you should use and what work with every other program in the world.

Also important is here you have to decide if you want to check or uncheck the "Leave a copy of messages on the server" checkbox because you can't change it once you setup the connected account.  Until you are sure that Outlook.com is going to function well enough with all the other bugs you might want to check it to keep copies on the GoDaddy server still.  If you want to change it in the future you have to delete the connected account out and add it back in.

Although in reality this doesn't matter since when I wrote this Microsoft's Outlook.com still cannot delete the messages off the GoDaddy server but at least it can download them now.  Although it's really a pain to log back into your GoDaddy account every week to manually delete the message and might be reason enough to just give up and switch the Google's GMail.

6.)    Now it should say that it is retrieving your emails and it might take several minutes to several hours to do this.