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
    2016-05-06T07:40:59+00:00

    Thank you, SeattleExpat. This solution worked out for me :)

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-05-06T13:39:36+00:00

    I stumbled across this thread today as it seems that the bug is back (again). I'm running Mac OSX 10.11.3 with Outlook version 15.21.1.  Just thought I'd throw this back out there in the case that anyone else is running into this again this year and has found a solution.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-05-06T17:22:41+00:00

    Yes Lindsy I concur I've been experiencing the same issue all of the sudden this week.  

    So far what seems to have helped is changing DOMAIN/username to username@DOMAIN as kindly suggested by others.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-05-09T18:44:31+00:00

    Hmmm... Scratch that... It's back again with a vengeance so making the Domain Username combo change did not work in the end  :(

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-05-09T19:24:32+00:00

    Hi everyone,

    Sorry to hear you're having this issue, we understand this is a pain point for our customers and we are currently investigating for a fix.

    We'd like to hear from you so we can get the bottom of this. Can you tell us --

    1. Are these always the modern auth prompt (O365 sign-in page that can be customized for your organization) or are they the native Outlook prompts (blue Outlook logo) or some combination of both?
    2. For multiple prompts, are they while Outlook is running normally (in the middle of a session), once each time on restart of the app, or several times on each restart of the app? (you mention "log into Outlook" so just want to clarify)
    3. Is the email address you've used to sign into WXP with the same as your O365 mail account in Outlook, and do you have the same address in the account's email address and user name fields in the accounts pref?

    This will get us started, and we can also send details on how to capture logs to help us investigate further, as mentioned in this thread.

    Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you.

    Best,

    Noyonima

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