CANNOT VERIFY SERVER IDENTITY M.HOTMAIL.COM SINCE JUNE 2020

I wouldn’t get to stressed about occasional appearance of this message. It is actually a good thing to see, as it serves as a warning that something might be intercepting network traffic.

The internet is a huge meshed network of connections - over which your internet traffic may pass over many links as it passes from A to B, the route that individual data packets will follow being completely outside of your control. Routing tables and protocols route traffic between major data centres - very often being routed through many countries before reaching its ultimate destination within a fraction of a second.

Without delving too deeply into motives or the mechanics, some countries routinely monitor network traffic as is crosses their borders - and this can sometimes cause TLS/SSL connections to raise a warning. Unless the issue happens all of the time, it is generally nothing with which to be overly concerned; it is almost certainly nothing over which you have any control - other than to be aware and monitor the situation.

Notwithstanding the previous paragraph, I’m not suggesting that your traffic is being monitored - only that that traffic can be monitored/analysed. Unless you live in a country where civil liberties are heavily controlled - or you are involved in certain activities - it’s merely something of which to be aware.

As for your specific observation, you’re not alone. I too see an occasional alert of this nature with my Microsoft mailboxes. An occasional alert is benign.

Whilst it is not possible to offer a fix, I hope this information and reassurance is helpful to you.

Seriously, if this only occurs sporadically (and once or twice a month is really nothing with which to be concerned) then put the stress aside.

As described, you’re doing nothing wrong. The alert is almost certainly benign - and is outside your control to resolve.

I do have one recommendation that may help - and if it doesn’t, will do nothing more than improve the overall security of any devices to which you apply the change. Update your devices to use a security focussed Recursive DNS Provider.

Here are three suggestions from which to choose. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are listed here; where your network is dual stack (likely), input the full set of addresses for the selected DNS provider:

Quad9 (recommended)

9.9.9.9

149.112.112.112

2620:fe::fe

2620:fe::9

OpenDNS

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

2620:0:ccc::2

2620:0:ccd::2

Cloudflare+APNIC

1.1.1.1

1.0.0.1

2606:4700:4700::1111

2606:4700:4700::1001