If you’re a bit of a dinosaur like me, and are still using one of the best Outlook e-mail clients Microsoft ever released, namely 2010, you may find one day that it suddenly won’t connect to your local mail server or internet service provider’s mail servers.
The error message you will get could simply be ‘disconnected’ or as in my case, I was told that my internet service provider’s mail server did not support my security protocol. I use UK firm Heart Internet and a call to them was of little help sadly.
Microsoft Outlook 2010
I spent time researching the problem on-line and found that chances were, Heart Internet had updated their systems and no longer supported TLS 1.0 which Outlook 2010 uses to authenticate with their mail servers. I thought I would have to upgrade everything to Outlook 2016…along with my computer which was still running Windows 7 32 bit. Yeah, I know, it’s almost an antique, but it does what I want. That said, it will need doing soon.
Rather than reinvent the wheel and post everything here again, here are some links to the articles I used to fix my problem:
- Jaap Wesselius had a similar problem and his fix is here.
- Here is one of Microsoft’s articles on enabling the later TLS protocols
- Microsoft have another more in depth article here.
I enabled TLS 1.2 on my computer and put the new settings into Outlook 2010, at which point it began to work normally, and has done ever since.
I contacted Heart Internet who then confirmed that they had updated their systems a week earlier. I told them that I felt it was poor that they hadn’t informed their clients they were going to update, at least fourteen days in advance. It would not have been difficult to find out who was still using TLS 1.0 and let them know.
Poor show Heart Internet!