Instructions on fix do not work

Question

Started with error in Outlook (Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021), "SIGN IN Your Account (names my email address) needs attention, please sign in to use your account," so I took the link "Sign in Via Browser."

In Edge I hit the check box after the Outlook Icon and, "Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail" hit "Continue" and, "Hmmm....can't read this page, local host refused to connect." So, Plan A: "Search web for localhost" and I got a bunch of Azure options, for which I have zero idea what that's about, how to navigate, what Azure might mean in my life, assumed red herring, and went back to "Hmmm..." and "Checking the Proxy and Firewall" It says to check my internet connection, which I obviously have since I am writing this, so plan B, "Allow Microsoft Edge to access the network in your firewall or antivirus settings." Edge works fine so plan C, "If you use a proxy server," which is another dead end since I am not using a proxy setting.

So, Plan D. Copied and pasted "SIGN IN Your Account (names my email address) needs attention, please sign in to use your account," and there are a bunch of different answers from Microsoft Techies who want blame Google. If you mess around with those long enough you get to one that says to open gmail in a browser and eventually one directs to open gmail in a browser, hit the gear symbol for settings and "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" then "IMAP Access" and instructs me to do something that is not an available command, because "IMAP is now always enabled to by default in Gmail."

So, Plan E, what do I need to do to get my gmail account to work in Outlook?

Answer 1

Dear James, 

Unfortunately, as a forum moderator, I am not able to inspect your Outlook profile or account to diagnose this directly. My role here is limited to general guidance you can apply from your side. You did a thorough job working through this, and you were right to discard most of what you found. Two quick confirmations before the fix. The localhost address is not a website. It is a temporary callback that Google uses to hand authorization back to Outlook on your own machine, so it has nothing to do with Azure and nothing to do with your internet connection, proxy or firewall. You were also correct about IMAP. Google enables it by default now, so that advice is outdated and there is nothing for you to change there. The usual cause is a stuck authorization, so the fix is to clear both ends and start clean.

Revoke access on the Google side

1. Close Outlook completely.
2. Sign in to your Google account in a browser.
3. Go to Manage your Google Account > Security.
4. Open Your connections to third-party apps and services.
5. Select Microsoft apps & services.
6. Choose Remove all access, then confirm.

Clear the cached credential in Windows

1. Open Control Panel > Credential Manager.
2. Select Windows Credentials.
3. Under Generic Credentials, look for entries beginning with MicrosoftOffice16_Data:OAUTH2, expanding each to find those containing tp_google_imap_Oauth2.
4. Remove only the entries for the affected Gmail account.
5. Restart Windows, open Outlook and complete Sign in via browser again.

If nothing Gmail related appears in Credential Manager, the cached identity may sit in the registry instead. Several people with this exact symptom found the account key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\Identities and deleting the failed Gmail entry allowed setup to complete. Please back up the registry before changing anything there.

If it still fails

Rather than keep modifying the existing profile, start a clean one. Hold Shift while starting Outlook to open the profile picker, or right click Start > Run and enter Outlook.exe /profiles. Select Options > New, name the profile, then add the Gmail account and complete the Google permission screen. Test sending and receiving before adding any other accounts.

For reference: Create a profile in classic Outlook for Windows | Microsoft Support

One thing worth checking is your default browser. The callback has to return to whichever browser Windows opens by default, so if that is set to something other than the browser where you are signed in to Google, the handoff can fail.

Please do not manually configure IMAP, use an app password, or change firewall settings unless the automatic Google authorization fails with a genuinely different error. Current Outlook builds are meant to add Gmail through Google's browser-based sign-in.

Clearing both the Google authorization and the cached credential resolves this in most cases, so I would start there before trying anything more involved.

I hope this helps. Looking forward to your reply.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Yes" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".  

Note: Please follow the steps in the forum documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.