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:
- Outlook 2015 Mac keeps asking for Gmail password
- Outlook for Mac 15.9 - Exchange Password Issue
- Repeated password requests
- Latest Outlook 15.9 release causes authentication problems with Exchange server
- Outlook for Mac preview 15.11.0 keeps forgetting my Exchange password
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
