Microsoft blocked my outlook.com account for using a VPN. Any ideas?

Last week google did something like that to me. It said "device not recognized" and "suspected activity detected" and won't let me in even after I reset my password. That was my reality check. Fortuanately, I was able to login via my old smartphone. I did a google takeout and downloaded all my data. Then I got a domain name and protonmail account and changed email on all of my accounts to my own domain. Now I have some peace of mind that nothing would be lost even if my gmail account is to be gone tomorrow.

One suggestion: for your primary email address, use an alias (college alumni account, personal dns, etc.) that forwards to your provider of choice (gmail, outlook, whoever) so that when this kind of thing happens you can just update your forwarding address with your provider and instantly restore access to your other accounts.

Doesn’t help with your old email, though...

I have been hosting my own email for a while now. It has it's quirks, and outbound can be hard, but for just getting password reset emails and the like, it does everything I need it to. I use my own domain, with a catch-all for everything on the domain, that way I can just make up emails on the fly. 'nick.apps.hackernews@mydomain.com' is a pretty common set up for me.

I deploy the mailu service to a small home server using HomelabOS, configured to use a $5 Digital Ocean droplet as a bastion server to prevent needing to mess with dynamic DNS, port forwards, and firewall circumvention.

You don't really need own email server to solve such problem. If only you had own domain, you could have moved it to different provider and still have access to the services which require your email address.

By the way, I often hear how it's good for privacy to use (basically all the time) such VPNs. But my experience so far is that using internet via popular VPNs is annoying. Some websites won't let you in, you get a lot of random CAPTCHAs to solve (e.g. to get Google results) and it seems you can lose email account. For me it's too much hassle.

> Microsoft blocked my outlook.com account for using a VPN. Any ideas? […] The reason is that I use NordVPN to connect to the internet.

That is weird. Are you confident NordVPN caused the problem?

I ask because I also have a NordVPN subscription. I have it for more than a year now. I keep it running 24/7 and switch countries every 2-3 days. I visit all the major websites, and I have never had significant problems with my accounts. Google Search is probably the only website (that I remember) that blocks NordVPN IP addresses, but I connect to a different server and reload the page to continue.

When I switch between NordVPN servers, I do it across countries. For example, I browse the Internet for a couple of hours from France and then switch to a Japan server. It is impossible to travel between France and Japan in less than 5 minutes, so, Outlook —among other companies— flag these connections as highly suspicious. However, aside from a security alert, I have never had any problems connecting to my online accounts. Even my banks are cool with NordVPN.

I am not saying NordVPN was not the cause of your problems. Anything is possible.

It would help me, though, to know what server(s) you selected to avoid connecting to them.

You can find them in the NordVPN connection history or system logs.

I hope you recover access to your account. Thanks in advance.

For my own purposes (coffee shops, basic geolocation stuff), I usually spun up a VPN server on Linode or something like that. You still run into a lot of issues (many services blacklist VPS provider ranges, including most streaming services), but I never got any suspensions as a result.

And the reason why NordVPN IP was blocked is that NordVPN is often used for scam/hack purposes.

I was in a similar situation. My outlook.com account was locked because I was violating their "no nudity" policy and some random naked girls (legal aged ofc!) were uploaded to skydrive. This happened several years ago.

I lost everything and couldnt access any mails.

After trying everything possible online, I wrote Microsoft a letter. A real letter on paper. Several weeks later I got a reply that they could do nothing as their tos was violated.

FUCK microsoft. Since then I am very careful with centralization of accounts. I am using many different email and cloud provider today and despise people who are happy that e.g. apple is today providing everything: from music over cloud to movies, mail, pay and so much more.

Get yourself a lifetime domain name. And connect that to a email service. And do regular backups of your mails in a structured way.

Email hoster misbehaving. Just switch mail provider, keep mail adres, restore mail. And live a happy life?

> I've been thinking about it over the last several days and, legitimately, the only possible recourse is to run your own email server.

A possible alternative that is almost as good might be to get your own domain and use some email service like Fastmail with that domain. Have something that regularly downloads all your mail from the service (which might be as simple as configuring your normal email client to download and retain everything).

If you ever have a problem with Fastmail, sign up for some other email service that allows you to use your own domain, such as Protonmail, and change your domain's mail-related records to point to that service.

Your incoming email will be down during the time it takes to sign up for the other service and change your domain setup, but hopefully getting tossed off email services is a once in a blue moon event for you so.

(If you do this, make sure that changing domain settings at your name service provider does not depend on receiving email at your domain. It would be very irritating to not be able to point your mail-related records to the new provider because your name service provider is sending a TOTP token to your old email provider).

Right now there is a lot of activity around the US elections and ransomware campaigns where VPN devices are a common source of traffic.

Many places will discard the traffic due to elevated risk. Frankly, the public VPN services are pretty pointless anyway.

Did you attach a phone number to the account?

I had a similar issue with an outlook account I abandoned for a few years. They claimed that the account had been used to send spam (a bloody lie.) It was an account I used for RECEIVING spam (I don't see how that's a violation of terms of service).

They simply wanted collect my phone number. Try to go through the recovery process. They might simply be trying to get your phone number.

Many service providers will block access from known VPN endpoints. Try changing your endpoint and see if that helps. Otherwise, pick a different VPN.

It's unfortunately late by now for you, but I would suggest to have a local copy of all your data in the cloud. I use offlineimap to download all my email boxes each hour and commit them in a git repository. If the lock me out, at least I keep my data.

> the only possible recourse is to run your own email server

Or you get paid email hosting, preferably from a company whose entire business is just that. Then they'd have a stronger incentive to make sure their users are able to keep using their service.

How do you know it was because of your vpn? Where are the other stories?

They told you specifically it's because you use a VPN to connect, or is this your guess?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oaccou...

I heard fastmail is pretty cool

The reason is that I use NordVPN to connect to the internet.

I can tell you that using a VPN wasn't why your account was blocked. Most corporate employees connect to Outlook.com through corporate VPNs (both of my last employers required it).