Outlook 2016 doesn't accept password or app password

Sometime you can have 2 instance of Outlook open in the background (sometime it happens) so Outlook wont open. Use your task manager to cheek that, and shut down every Outlook instance you can find, and then start Outlook, or just simply restart your PC.

Some of the suggested "workarounds" may not work for you or others. This is really a messed up issue, that is not resolvable on the client side (as soon as your client email configuration is correct).

The prompting for password is back and more persistent than yesterday afternoon. It seems like whatever MS has been doing to mitigate the problem isn't working.

Using Outlook 2016.

Well... the 2 steps verification does not work.

Outlook 2016 did not accept the app password.

After closing outlook 2016, it did not start either, even in safe mode (/safe).

I disabled the 2 steps verification, and went back to normal.

Now at least the outlook 2016 starts, and get the new mails.

Still it does not accept the normal password !

I am still getting the disturbing message.

This stuff scares me! Your developers "...had to go look at the code..." This suggest they made all auth related changes without even knowing how Microsoft's own Outlook apps of different generation handle auth. This is just stunning that they would make changes to something as important as authentication code without doing ample homework to make sure at least MS' own apps can work with these changes.

Anyways, so what are users of Outlook 2013 and 2016 supposed to do?! I want to point out that the Outlook version number scheme doesn't age well. Outlook 2019 isn't even that old...and 2013/2016 are very much still in circulation. The very latest Outlook as a part of M365 or the old O365 doesn't have a year-based version scheme. The last version I know of is 2019. The build version might say 23xx or 24xx but the current latest apps are basically identical to 2019, which is ver 16.xx.xx.xx. Honestly, minimal changes were made for several years and it appears the Build Number got increased as mere "improvement" to collect the subscription fee.

At this rate, can MS just identify what true offline email clients will work with Hotmail/MSN/Live mail and also support POP3? I am sure I am not the only one that want to have a local copy of my emails and want to delete email off the server for multitude of reasons. Local client for Hotmail/MSN/Live mail is 100x better than PWA. I can reads through emails, file emails, moving things, change attributes and so on in lighting fast speed, and the local client would queue and process these in the background. With PWA, everything I do has to wait for the server to respond, it's very slow in comparison.

No one with the right mind will allow "new Outlook" to use Microsoft Cloud/Azure service to access non-Microsoft email servers and allow it to look at all of our data... It's an insane idea. Data privacy-aside, this current mess, going on into the 4th week, is a PERFECT EXAMPLE of why we don't want to aggregate everything through Microsoft!

I also thought Outlook 2016 supported modern auth but unfortunately that is only for M365. The Outlook Team had to go look at the code and confirm they only did the 2FA with App Password support for Outlook.com.

@thegreger,

The only users that will see ads are those using the free version of New Outlook. If you have a paid Office Subscription you will not get ads.

Not true. I have Office 365 for Business, paid via my company subscription, now called M365. I am also a developer in the Windows ecosystem, so on my lab bench system running Win11 (need to work on latest Win11 dev builds), the "new Outlook" was pushed into the system and I am using it to access my work email and another account, it definitely display ads! Since I cycle through lab bench systems, I don't want to install the Outlook desktop app, which has a 3-device limit per our license. I could, but it's a hassle to go deactivate the license and re-add a new device on a regular basis.

Now, one may argue why don't I just use a browser and access Outlook web interface. It's because these endless privacy-violating features MS has added. Once I try to log into outlook.office.com, Edge intercepted the login attempt and auto-launch the "new Outlook" and want to add my work account to the system as well, which I don't want to. It seems by adding it to "new Outlook", I could avoid having the account added to the system. I suppose another way is just to get Chrome, Brave or other browser that is not connected to the OS under the hood.

And here is the giant mess Microsoft is creating if they ultimately plan to have this single "new Outlook" replacing the free "Mail" client in Win10/Win11, and current paid "Outlook apps", more specifically desktop apps, that are a part of Office 365 (now M365) subscription or an one-time fee one-machine perpetual license. The current app behaves like a normal desktop app and email client. I can use POP3 to download emails from a server, and the transaction comes from the desktop client and my IP address of my computer - it's a native client.

With the "new Outlook", it's essentially a PWA, so any account I add to it will be stored in Microsoft Cloud and it means Microsoft Cloud/Azure will ping the mail server to retrieve the mail using the inputted credentials, then renders it as web content to my "new Outlook" PWA. Microsoft Cloud/Azure is acting as the client, not the "new Outlook" app. At least that's how it is behaving now = acting like the email aggregator feature.