I am thoroughly confused and am reaching out to the community for help, please.
My daily driver has been 10V. I still have my 10III. 5.0.0.73 on both.
I’ve had two M365 work accounts on my phone. The primary synchronized emails, contacts and calendar. The second, only emails.
I am on T-Mobile USA.
For the last few months, MMS messages almost entirely ceased to work. In the U.S., group texting is a thing and I completely understand that the rest of the planet doesn’t use them. I’ve accepted that fact, but at least the last many years, I could read all of the messages as SMS messages from an individual. As of late, I have been unable to read them at all. “Problem downloading message” is all I get. The same with photos sent to me directly from individuals.
In an effort to troubleshoot these MMS-related problems, I have spent over a week looking at MMS Logger and doing what a very kind community member suggested, all to no avail.
I finally called T-Mobile and they said I have a very old SIM card in my phone and I needed to go get a new one. I did that today.
When I woke up today, I checked email on my phone and all was well. I went to the T-Mobile store and obtained a new SIM card, which they promptly provisioned for me. I changed my MMS and Data APN settings from epc.tmobile.com to fast.t-mobile.com and tested the internet. I could surf the web just fine in SFOS browser and Android Firefox browser.
I then had people reply to the group texts that have been recently active and I could read the messages, albeit as SMS messages. But I could read them.
I then had an iPhone user and a SFOS user each send me photos, and I received them both. Things were looking great.
I tried downloading recently sent (last two days) MMS group text messages that previously failed, and they started coming in.
I was about to come on here and post to share the good news, but got sidetracked with other life events.
Later in the evening, I looked on my phone to check emails and noticed that neither account had updated in the last seven hours.
I have now spent six hours trying to resolve this problem.
I have my 10III on WiFi because I haven’t had my SIM card in it. But it has an operational camera, so I use that as my master account holder for Signal and, begrudgingly, WhatsApp (for work). My same two M365 accounts have been working on that phone forever. They keep sychronized via WiFi and all has been great.
I decided to check my 10III via WiFi and it no longer was able to get emails from M365.
On the 10V, I deleted the accounts and tried adding them again from scratch. They fail.
When adding the accounts, I select “Microsoft 365”. Next screen, I “consent”.
I am then redirected to SFOS browser that has the login.microsoftonline.com and my accounts listed. I select one. The next screen, I enter password.
If I enter the wrong password, it reports that information to me and I’m prompted to try it again.
Once I enter the correct password, I am prompted for my MFA code. When I enter the correct one, the browser does some things in the background briefly, then returns me to the Settings > Accounts task where I then have the option to “Accept”, or on the bottom half of the screen, under “Server” area, there is a “More” button.
To be thorough, I click “More” and there is no server address populated. I believe this is to be expected because the Autodiscover function hasn’t happened yet. I click “Less” to collapse that information, then click “Accept” in upper-right.
Screen says “Retrieving settings from server”. After maybe 45 seconds of watching the circle chase it’s tail, the screen briefly reads “Checking credientials”, then adds the account.
I am then able to modify what I want synced, when, etc. The option in the upper-right is “Accept”. I select that.
I see “Checking server settings and policies” for less than a second, then get sent to the error screen that reads:
Could not add account. Could not contact the server about the policies it requires.
I have tried not closing the Settings > Accounts app but swipe it over to try and do the workaround of “disabled” account being made “active”, but I never get it to work.
I have tried this while on cellular data. I have tried this while cellular data is disabled and only on WiFi. Same indications.
I created a new M365 with one email sent and received. Same indications.
When I can get into the account settings again, I look at the Server settings and it is then populated with outlook.office365.com, which tells me that the autodiscover and authentication worked enough to retrieve that information.
I am the M365 admin for both domains, and I have gone into the admin portal. The device is not quarantined.
I selected my user in M365 and listed devices, then deleted both of my Sailfish devices thinking perhaps something with the SIM card and IMEI was tied together and this is causing a conflict. I thought that perhaps clearing out the devices and starting with a new account, I could see if that helped. It did not resolve the issue.
I am perplexed as to how changing a SIM card out could cause all of this. Perhaps there is something else that happened on the Microsoft side of things that just so happens to have coincidentally happened on the day I changed a SIM card. And the new SIM card was never inserted into the 10III, so I really feel like this leads me to something on the Microsoft side on two different accounts in two different tenants, neither of which I logged into until this evening to try and resolve this.
Does anyone have any non-destructive ideas?
[edit for updated info] - I queried online if there are any updates Microsoft made that would affect my situation, and the response was that starting 1 March 2026, Microsoft is blocking all devices using Exchange ActiveSync versions below 16.1. The AI results then said, “This often manifests as the ‘could not contact the server about the policies it requires’ message that you’ve been seeing.”
I also just asked my son, who has an account on the same domain as my primary account (email, contacts and calendar), and his has not updated today, either. I seem to have coincidentally updated a SIM card on the same day Microsoft did something to the two M365 tenants I use.
Is anyone else finding similar problems?
