Seeing “Need Password” but when entered it asks again? Probably modern authentication got bugged on your local machine. Here are the best fixes and workarounds to solve this annoying issue.

1) Clear Windows Credentials

Close all Office applications Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. then, point your mouse to the “START” button and right-click it. Select “RUN”

Type or copy-paste: control /name Microsoft.CredentialManager, press „OK“

On the appeared window, click “Windows Credentials” and remove everything that resembles “Microsoft” or “Office Suite”, usually it starts with “Office15… Office16… Azure… etc.”. Don’t be afraid to remove any of them, worst case scenario you will have to re-login to some service.

For best results I would highly suggest restarting your PC before trying to launch Outlook. No luck? Move on to the next step.

2) Re-create your Outlook profile

I will assume your organization is using Office 365 for their email services. This will re-download all the history of your emails but still, you will lose your Outlook settings, like signatures, rules, layouts.

Open “Control Panel”. Point your mouse to “START” button, right-click it, select “RUN” and type:

control, press “OK”.

Change your view from “Category” to “Large Icons”, then find and select “Mail (Microsoft Outook)” from the list. Sometime the name might defer but the icon is always the same.

Click on “Show Profiles”, then press on “Add”. Type your new profile name (can be anything) and click “OK”.

On the new window, select “Manual setup or additional server types”, and click “Next”.

Select “Microsoft 365” and enter your full email address, click “Next”,

You will be prompted with modern authentication window, enter your user details again.

After successful log in, you should a window like this:

Now, go back to that Office Profile window, locate “Always use this profile”, choose your new profile and click “OK”. Launch Outlook, wait for full synchronization.

3) Disable Office365 modern authentication using windows registry

This is a huge workaround, but I almost guarantee that Outlook will start to work again after this. If you are using MFA, no worries, I will show you how to create “App Password” in the Office portal.

First, remove all the Microsoft, Office credentials like mentioned in the first paragraph. Open any Office application, sign out from there too.

Then, again, open “RUN” window the same way as mentioned earlier, type: regedit, click “OK”.

Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity

For older versions of office it might be in “15.0”. Create “DWORD (32-bit)” by right-clicking on non-focused area.

Type: EnableADAL and leave it as it is.

Restart your PC, launch any Office app, login back to Microsoft. This time you should be greeted by old-style logon window.

After sign-in, launch Outlook, enter your email and password one more time, press “OK”. It should start to synchronize.

I am using Two-Factor authentication what should I do?!

You will have to create so called “App Password”, go to https://office.com and sign-in with your credentials. Click on your name initials in the right corner, select “View account”

And click on “Security info”, then “Add method” -> “App password”.

Use this special password to sign in to your Office suite and Outlook.

Good luck,
Audrius.