Outlook for Mac 2016 - Repeated password prompts still an issue ...

Anonymous
2015-06-20T22:09:21+00:00

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:

  • Bug shows up in Outlook for Mac versions 15.9.x and up, therefore ...
  • Version 15.8 and earlier are not affected, but that is a super old preview version from 2015
  • Changing the way you present your credentials can sometimes help:

            e.g. username@DOMAIN vs. DOMAIN\username vs. username

  • Problems seem to affect Exchange Server authentication as well as IMAP or POP,
  • Deleting your account and setting up Outlook from scratch sometimes helps,
  • The issue seems to be intermittent, comes and goes.

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

Outlook | MacOS | Legacy Outlook for Mac | For business

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.

0 comments

263 answers

Sort by: Oldest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2015-08-06T18:44:09+00:00

    I replied to a few posts today about this issue, but now I'm not having problems. The only thing I've changed is that I unchecked the IMAP IDLE option in the Advanced options (unchecking "AppNap" didn't work).

    As I mentioned earlier, I don't use keychain, and it wasn't an Exchange account. Sorry, but I don't know tech-speak, and it took a while for me to find the version of Outlook I have right now: 14.5.3!!! :)

    Hope the situation gets resolved soon for everyone!

    PS. My password is constantly deleted in the account, and every time I tried to change other settings, they would revert back or not work, except for this.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2015-08-08T09:17:02+00:00

    This is what I wrote about previously and why I think only a subset of users is experiencing this problem.  Many or most users have exchange servers at the same domain as the domain on their email address.  Therefore, they will not experience this problem which seems limited to exchange server accounts where the email address domain is different from the domain of the exchange server.

    Thinking about this further, this may be a security feature implemented to assure that credentials are not switched to bogus servers, but I'm not convinced that this is the case.  It is also true that desktop installations do not see this problem as much as laptops.  Further, it seems to be restricted to "wild" access, as the frequency of password requests diminishes when I'm connected via a VPN.  Disconnecting from the VPN causes the password prompts to return.

    This issue is clearly a bug in password and username construction that is passed to keychain, and then later accessed for re-authentication.  The problem is Keychain will not accept any changes to the Keychain entry.  Outlook seems to recognized that it has changed since last update and refuses it, only to make another entry with the bogus domain name again.  Again, this seems like a security check to make sure that the password has not been altered by other programs.  That would lead me to believe that Outlook is also storing some information about the keychain entry in another location in order to check on the credential authenticity before using it.  This makes the fix more complicated because I have no idea where it would save this information.

    This does not seem like a difficult problem to solve.  They just need to remove the erroneous code that supplants the domain on the user entry of username and password.  It shouldn't be doing that in the first place - never used to.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-10T08:01:57+00:00

    This is happening to me too.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2015-08-10T09:42:36+00:00

    I don't believe it is tied to the exchange domaine being different from the adress domain : my e-mail adress is using the same domain as my company exchange server and I'm still having the repeating password problem. 

    In my case the variation, is that connections go through a load balancing appliance from Kemp. I don't know if that might be (or not) a factor in the issue.

    The only working solution for me is rolling back Outlook to version 15.8 (which is not a problem on my macbook air running Office 2011, but is a pain in the proverbial butt when trying to run Office 2016...).

    Well I think that's one of a pleasures of trying to run MS software on a Mac ;-)

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2015-08-12T02:07:21+00:00

    The 15.13.1 update seems to have fixed it. No password prompts for the 3 hours since installing it. Will update if this turns out to be illusory.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments