Outlook continually re-asking for password

Anonymous
2017-01-05T16:43:54+00:00

Hi there, 

Wonder if anyone can help - this issue is causing me considerable pain.

Essentially my mac outlook keeps asking for my password periodically:

Enter your account information for "XXXXXX"

User name: <My email address>

Password: <unpopulated>

<checkbox> Remember this password in my keychain

When I enter the password, and submit the form it asks me immediately for the same details again. Even if I select use keychain.

Then after two attempts, it shows me this message:

Mail could not be received at this time.

The server for account "<my name>" returned the error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password." Your username/password may be incorrect. Would you like to try re-entering your password?

No/Yes

If I click "Yes" it shows me the same dialogue again....and when I click "yes" again it disappears.

This process restarts every 15 minutes through my working day - but I do get emails sporadically. So its kinda disruptive!

Can anyone help?

Graham

Outlook | MacOS | Legacy Outlook for Mac | For business

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Anonymous
2017-01-12T15:50:23+00:00

Hi All,

Thanks for your updates.

Firstly, I’m sorry that I may have misunderstood your different scenarios in the posts above. I have done more research and consulting about the issue and please check the different steps below:

@Graham, since you are using an Office 365 account, please double-confirm whether all the Office 365 related credentials are deleted on your Mac. (Although I understand you may have deleted the keychain folder earlier due to an irrelevant issue.) To check that, please refer to the steps below:

  1. Go to KeyChain Access.
  2. Search "Exchange" under Login --> All Items and delete everything.
  3. Search "Office" and delete everything.
  4. Search "ADAL" and delete everything.
  5. Launch Outlook.
  6. You will get the activation prompt and then If account is already added you will see the password prompt for app and ADAL again. Please do 2-Factor Authentication if asked to.

You can also let your colleague try the steps to see if the issue can be fixed.

@Tanner, since you are using a Mediacom account, I suppose you configured the account via IMAP in the Outlook for Mac client, right? Anyway, you may need to delete the Mediacom related credentials and the information in the thread that I shared above may not work for you. Please refer to these steps instead:

  1. Open Applications/Keychain Access
  2. On the left, select the Login Keychain
  3. On the left, select the Passwords category
  4. Find out and delete all the Mediacom related credentials.

Let me know how it works this time. Thanks for your time and cooperation.

Regards,

Sam

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-01-27T08:31:36+00:00

    Hi Tanner,

    Yes. You can try to delete the keychain again and see if the issue can be fixed.

    If the issue persists, please provide the version of the Outlook client.

    Thanks,

    Chris

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-01-28T10:32:18+00:00

    Hi Tanner,

    Is there any update?

    Thanks,

    Chris

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-01-28T15:18:08+00:00

    I continue to get the Password prompt. It seems Keychain is unable to remember the Outlook password for some reason. I'm not getting the prompt many multiple times a day like before, but it does come up often through the day. Over time the problem seems to accelerate for some reason.

    I think my work around will be to tolerate the prompt until it becomes far too frequent, then delete the mail related items in the Keychain>Login>Passwords. That seems to put the issue to rest for a while. Perhaps some Outlook update in the future will address the issue once and more al.

    Thanks.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-01-29T07:51:35+00:00

    Hi Tanner,

    Once the issue get worse, please delete all the Mediacom related credentials in Keychain to see if the issue can be fixed.

    Meanwhile, may I know if your Outlook was updated? I noticed that your Outlook version was 15.29 (161209). Please let us know the current version.

    Best Regards,

    Aaron

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