Diagnose Issues Setting Up a Office 365 Email

[avatar user="Jamie Poindexter" size="thumbnail" align="left" link="attachment" /]byJamie Poindexter|Aug 15, 2021|Jamie's Tech Corner,Our blogSetting up a new or existing Office 365 email in Outlook is normally a straightforward process. You open Outlook and if it’s the first time it will ask for the email and password and you are set. A couple things can prevent this from working though. Here are a couple things you can try if you are running into issues.Update Office:Updates for Office are constantly being pushed from Microsoft. If you are running into programs the first step is to make sure the program is up to date. Open Word or another Office program and go to File -> Account.

Locate the office update button and click update now

If Office is not up to date you will get a message that updates are being downloaded and then installed. This will not require a reboot, but you will be asked to close all Office programs. Now you can try again to setup the email account.Multi-Factor is being used:If you have MFA enabled, you might need to create a app password in place of using your normal email password. You can tell if a app password is needed by the way the password prompt looks. If it looks like a generic windows login prompt like this:

You will have to create a app password to enter here along with the email address. However if it looks like this:

You can you the normal email password and it will send you a text/MFA prompt to verify its you. Note that this only applies if you have MFA (multi factor) enabled on the account.Bad stored Credential:Windows keeps credentials for websites and programs in a store so you are not prompted each time for the password. If the stored credential for Outlook is incorrect or corrupt it might not allow you to login. This can be safely cleared so it will force Outlook to ask for the correct password. Click on Start and type credential manager.

Click on Windows Credentials and locate “outlook.office365.com” from the list. Click the down arrow and choose remove

Now you can try setting up the account againUse the Office 365 diagnostic tool:Microsoft has the following tool that can be used to diagnose issues and help setting up the account for you. You can download it here.Run the program and you can then choose Outlook and then “I need help setting up my office 365 email account”

Enter the email account and password and it will run through some tests and come back with any issues found.

At the end it will ask to set up the email account for you.If all of the above fails it might be a good time to run a repair of Office or try another device to see if it will work correctly.