Fixing Outlook 2016 with MS Support and Recovery Assistant

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I had issues adding a specific Office365 email account to my Outlook 2016 desktop application on one of my machines for a while now. Giving me the "something went wrong and outlook couldn’t set up your account. please try again. if the problem continues, contact your email administrator." message and no options to add information manually in Outlook 2016.

So with the new year I decided to give it another go and see if I could solve it looking at it with a fresh mindset.

I’m not the only one given the posts like this one:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2026831-unable-to-setup-office-365-mail-account-on-outlook-2016

The post above however didn’t provide me with a solution so I searched a little bit further until I ran into this little gem:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/about-the-microsoft-support-and-recovery-assistant-e90bb691-c2a7-4697-a94f-88836856c72f

It runs you through a series of questions and analyses the settings (for Outlook 2016 and Office365 in this case) to find that it had issues getting the mail properties, fixed it and created a new Outlook profile that actually worked!

I wanted to get the email account in the existing profile however, but that wasn’t an issue either anymore … Just went over the process of adding the new email account like I used to and now it magically added the account without issues at all. Apparently it also changed something on my Outlook installation but who cares. I finally got my long failing email account to work in 2020 … how is that for a Happy 2020

Happy 2020

It’s been a while, almost year, here … and whenever there is a new year, we pick up our resolutions from last year and see what we can do that we missed progressing the past year. Blogging is one of these things … so let’s pick this up again for now and see where it ends.

In my professional work I’ve been limited in doing things programmer-wise, more a people manager than coding manager at this time. Trying to get our foreign team up and running and at sometimes actually deliver some products. Doing so means I have almost no time at all to do programming.

For this reason, I decided to go on and do the Live Coding thing. Forcing me to go live in front of a camera and coding live on screen is pushing me to keep my coding skills on par. Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!

So join me in my Live Coding sessions on Twitch. You can find my channel here:

https://twitch.tv/MaartenVanStam

Hit the follow button if you are, like me, too lazy to look up the broadcast schedule so you get notified whenever I get online to do the Programming Thing.

At this time I’m working on two main topics:

· Office Development (Who would have guessed?) where I’m trying to do the same things that I was able to do using VSTO to build my Add-ins. Spoiler Alert: You can’t do everything you were able to do with VSTO, but you can do some cool shit anyway …

· Blazor Web Development, building web sites using C# and .NET Core … where Office moved away from .NET to Web Technologies .NET did exactly the other way around and is now focusing on Web Technologies!

Let me know what you think about all these new and not so recent technologies … will they save the world?