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

2018 Just started – Happy New Year

Blog 2018

A lot happened in 2017 on all levels …

Marcel Meijer, Fanie Reynders and I did our weekly SDN Cast again for the second year already. We only skipped a few weeks to attend some large conferences and create some impressions of the events. You can find all the videos on our YouTube channel: www.sdncast.nl/youtube (or direct link: www.youtube.com/sdncast).

I was awarded MVP for the 13th time in 2017, in fact twice for 2017 – once in January 2017 and ‘automagically’ renewed in July 2017 due to a change in the MVP Program cycles. Instead of 4 quarterly cycles to be renewed once a year the award cycle changed to July for everyone.

So for me for the first time since 2007 (as I was awarded in January of 2016) a New Years Day without the suspense of being renewed or not to be renewed. In 2018 the thrill is shifted to July so we’ll see what happens by then Smile.

Besides all of this we did three SDN Events (one day conference) an Office 365 Developer Bootcamp to teach Microsoft Teams development to a nice group of local developers (The Office Developer Bootcamp was a global initiative where everywhere in the world groups of people organized local Bootcamp events. Our Bootcamp was in Amsterdam last November).

But there was more … Dutch .NET Group Meetups, Build Conference, TechDays NL, Community MVP Event in Denmark and not to forget another year of great technologies!

Anyway … there happened too much to list here so that only leaves me to wishing you all the best for 2018 with many more events like we’ve seen in 2017!

The show must go on …