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The latest version of MS Outlook is awful


I haven't personally used Microsoft Outlook, the proper email client program, for about 10 years.

As I've ranted about in the past, doing battle with it on a daily basis ended up not being fun, so I ditched it.

Sadly I do still have to deal with it occasionally for my customers and I still don't like it.

In fact, the latest incarnation of it may in fact be the worst and most frustrating one yet.

The one thing it should do easiest and best IS the most frustrating piece of crap I have had to deal with in a long time.

The adding of an email account, from which to collect email (funnily enough), is a terrible process.

All you get to do is to enter the email address then Outlook goes off and finds everything it thinks it needs to know about that email account and leaves us with very little to no option to set it how we want or indeed, in some cases, need.


Once Outlook has done its look-up of the mail server settings we get to put our password in and that is about it.

If something goes wrong, that's all it says "Something has gone wrong!". We get to "Go back" or "Retry".

There's no help or clarification of what in fact has gone wrong. Is the password wrong? Is the email address wrong? What?

If you need to change advanced settings there's a tick box for that but what it offers and what it allows to do is rather short of adequate and we still don't get any help with what has gone wrong.

For example, I battled with Outlook recently with it refusing to connect to an email account that Outlook 2013 had connected to first time with no problem.

It wasn't until I was forced to install and try Mozilla Thunderbird, did I discover that the password for the email was wrong.

If Outlook had just reported that fact a lot of bulls**t would have been spared.

On top of this, another email account's password was being changed.

Neither for love nor money would Outlook let that happen.

Firstly it was a struggle to find where the hell this was stored now (BTW you need to choose "Repair" in the settings section where you used to change edit the account) and then, when the new password was entered Outlook could not "fix" the account. So we had to delete the email account and re-add it.

What a palava. What a load of crap.

More reasons to avoid MS Outlook like the plague. David

POSTSCRIPT:

I was recently sent a method to turn off this "simple email account" creation abomination.

I have copied and pasted below in case the source site ever goes away. I want to keep this information to hand.

It requires registry editing but if ytou stick to the instructions you should be fine.

Never, ever, get creative in the registry. You will kill your machine.

How to disable Simplified Account Creation in Outlook 2016

To disable the Simplified Account Creation dialog box in Outlook 2016 and use the traditional account dialog box instead, follow these steps.

  1. Exit Outlook.

  2. Backup your windows registry or create a restore point - https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/322756/how-to-back-up-and-restore-the-registry-in-windows

  3. Start Registry Editor. To do this, use one of the following procedures, as appropriate for your version of Windows.

  • Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 8: Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog box. Type regedit.exe, and then click OK.

  • Windows 7: Click Start, type regedit.exe in the search box, and then press Enter.

  1. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the user settings subkey in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\setup

or the group policy subkey in the registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\setup

  1. Point to New on the Edit menu and then DWORD (32-bit) Value.

  2. Type DisableOffice365SimplifiedAccountCreation, and then press Enter.

  3. Right-click DisableOffice365SimplifiedAccountCreation, and then select Modify.

  4. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.

  5. On the File menu, select Exit to exit Registry Editor.

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