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I have five email accounts hosted by Microsoft on Exchange. I access these accounts on a Windows 11 desktop running Outlook and Office Pro 2021, an iPhone, an iPad, and one laptop running Windows 11 and Office Pro 2021. These accounts and email clients have been working well for more than two years.
This week, I prepared a new laptop and installed an image of the existing working laptop (same make and model) and updated the licenses for Windows, office, and other software. Other than Outlook, everything works perfectly and the image saved me many hours of configuring software. Email messages (received and sent) up to the date of the image are showing but Outlook will not retrieve new email. A small message at the bottom says, "Password Needed" but when clicked, the screen flashes briefly and nothing happens. When I attempt to edit or add one of the working email accounts (only three were configured on the source image) the Outlook wizard searches for a long time, and finally indicates that the account cannot be found. (Problems like keyboard and password errors have been checked and triple-checked.) Outlook appears to be connected to the Internet (as the entire laptop is) but I can't authenticate that it is. It may not make any difference, however, because one of the configuration options sends me to a browser and my Microsoft account, where the same thing happens: Even online via a browser, Microsoft indicates that it cannot find the email address or the password is wrong. At the very same time, I can send and receive test email on all of the several devices I mentioned above using the same email addresses and passwords. The web 365 version of Outlook works well also. I have tried too many solutions to recount here but one that may be relevant is that I did a full online repair of Office Pro 2021 with no change in behavior.
I'm sorry for the long post. I have not encountered a problem quite like this in several decades of working with Outlook.
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Hi @Robert W Tucker ,
Could you try to see if you can log in successfully on other devices? Is there a device control policy?
I have several devices running identical versions of Office 2021 Outlook. All them work as expected, including maintaining sync across the Exchange email addresses on different devices. If I delete an email on one Outlook client, it soon shows up as deleted on all of them. Only this new client is behaving as per detail above.
Is there a specific error message? According to your description, it may be a problem with your new device. You can ask your hosting provider if there is a device restriction that has not added your new device, thus making it impossible to log in.
Microsoft is the Exchange host. The message is, "Need Password" in a very small icon at the bottom of the mail frame. Clicking that message produces a brief screen flash and then nothing, meaning no data entry popup in which the password could be re-entered. I have seen hundreds of complaints about this Outlook problem on various websites including this one and Microsoft has not provided a solution to any of them.
After clicking "Need Password" and failing, I have (dozens of times) returned to the "Account Settings\Account Settings{accountname}\Change screen and re-entered the password.
Here, I get one of two different kind of messages:
It would appear that the Outlook client is connecting to Microsoft Exchange server but is not accessing the account on this LG Laptop.
I am seeing many hundreds of people comment on very similar problems with Outlook but the detail on some of them does not permit me to determine that they are identical. Others are similar but definitely not identical.
QUESTION: Why would Microsoft's exchange server attempt to look up an account but report not finding it even as it is both finding and processing mail on other clients, one of them being virtually identical to this one? Word and Excel are continuously connected to Microsoft for license validation services and for things like looking up a term in Word's online research.
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I have spent over a week trying to figure this all out. I just wanted to remove my Gmail from my Mircosoft account so I could sort out parental controls between Family Link and Family Safety across different devices. I know I have completely messed my desktop and laptop up. I finally got my outlook back on my desktop, android phone and iPad with my yahoo and gmail accounts connected again plus the new outlook (Exchange) All confusing. Yet Outlook in 365 will not connect. One Drive keeps telling me to log in but will not take my new outlook email I replaced on my Microsoft account and keeps telling me to use my gmail that I removed.
Hi @Robert W Tucker ,
You can check the certificate and login credentials for consistency, or you can try to rebuild the profile.
I was unable to find a solution and ended up reinstalled Office Pro 2021. This necessitated reconfigured all of the email accounts and relocating the OST and PST account backup systems for each one. In the end, the 40 minutes I was hoping to save by using the existing configuration was lost many times over.