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

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-09-10T22:03:32+00:00

    So I got up this morning and Outlook has once again started to prompt for my password. In fact it will not even connect to Exchange, just prompts, tries to connect, prompts etc. 

    As far as I can tell nothing at my end has changed. There has been no update to Office 2016, no update to OSX and it was al working fine 8 hours previously.

    Next step for me will be to remove my account and start again but not optimistic.

    Hopefully we see an official fix or update soon as indicated at the start of this discussion.

    [update] I failed to noticed that it had reverted to using user@domain rather than domain\username. Changing back to domain\username has at least enabled it to authenticate.

    So why have the settings changed?

    Further, it still shows "not connected" but will sync mail (still does not always refresh the reading pane though). I wonder if it has anything to do with the push notifications from Exchange?

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-09-11T08:26:34+00:00

    Hello all-

    As the originator of this post - apologies for not updating the content of the main page for a while. In the midst of all these issues, my employer changed the way that remote users connect to corporate Exchange Servers, which now prevents me from using Outlook for Mac at all. Therefore, I haven't had the ability to do my own testing on releases after 15.12.x. That said, it appears that issues related to logon still persist -- which is disappointing. I'll do my best to keep updating that main thread if we find a breakthrough.

    Cheers-

     Seattle_Expat

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-09-17T20:34:33+00:00

    Version 15.14.0 had been released. I upgraded hoping it would fix the issue, but it still remains for me where it is toggling between "Connected" and "Not Connected". It seems like this is not going to get fixed. I guess I am forced to stay at 15.8.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-09-18T12:22:31+00:00

    I upgraded my system to El Capitan and the problems were immediately gone on all of my macs. I know this is not scientific but it works perfectly now on all versions including 15.14.0 (150911). You might want to give it a try.

    El Capitan is working very smoothly .

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-09-18T14:16:20+00:00

    Thats great news, I was wondering if the OS upgrade might fix it. I'll definitely be upgrading to El Capitan as soon as possible.

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