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All-
As we know, one of the biggest bugs in Outlook for Mac 2016 is the ever-so-annoying repeated password prompt problem. This refers to the constant pop-ups that make it appear like Outlook is forgetting your password every few minutes, etc. The problem was much discussed during the Preview phase of Office for Mac 2016 but never corrected. I did some digging on the forums here and found other threads that covered this problem with slight variances, but the core issue is the same -- credentials are somehow not being stored properly or become corrupted during normal operation of the software. List of the relevant threads I found below. This list may not be comprehensive:
It seems odd that a major bug like this remained unresolved after the official release of Office for Mac 2016 ... and still hasn't been corrected! Per post responses on Microsoft's official Office Blog, they are looking into authentication issues with Exchange Server, but who knows what that means or how long that will take. Based on what I can gather:
e.g. username@DOMAIN vs. DOMAIN\username vs. username
A ticket submitted by forum member *Filip Herman* to Microsoft's technical support around early August 2015 indicated that Microsoft is aware of the problem and has a planned fix in progress. Obviously its been years since that. Others have submitted tickets to support since. Scroll to the end to read the most current progress.
I'd encourage everyone to mark this post, indicating that you "recommend this discussion." This thread has tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments, so its clearly not an isolated issue. Unfortunately, my company abandoned the use of Outlook for Mac 2016 some while back because of this issue, so I don't have an active platform to test on anymore. However, keep trading ideas here as needed.
Best of luck-
Seattle_Expat
Using older versions of Outlook for Mac in business environments
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Hi mark88anz,
You're welcome!
Sounds like you are in the state most of the rest of us are in here -- running various Outlook versions side-by-side or resorting to OWA to get our work done. Appreciate the feedback and details provided.
Best-
SeattleExpat
All-
Strictly speaking, disabling the IPv6 protocol should have no effect on Outlook/Exchange Server authentication issues. Those processes are (should be) handled by entirely separate modules of the software. That said, having worked with Microsoft technology since Windows 95, I have seen a lot of things that defy logic. If that solved the issue for some, kudos to you. But I still think we are dealing with a malfunctioning process within Outlook itself, deleting the saved credentials, or some feature of the authentication process with Exchange Servers telling Outlook to re-authenticate the client erroneously.
All the same, I applaud the research and willingness to try new things to fix this issue.
Best-
SeattleExpat
Firstly, thanks Seattle_Expat for compiling this discussion.
I'm not technical, but maybe the symptoms may help the forensics.
Mark
The ipv6 solution is not a corrective action. I have done this and the password prompt frequency has gone down but still is a major issue.
Software is still not very usable.
This kind of worked for me. The frequency of the password requests dropped to maybe 10-15 times per hour. Not acceptable by any means, but at least it's limping along enough that it's somewhat useable.