Hi,
Since November 12 Tuesday patch day my Outlook 2013 would repeatedly prompt me for credentials on one of my Exchange account. I reported this to our help desk in charge of mail services and they couldn't explain how this can happen as my mailbox was configured
correctly using Auto Discovery. Deleting and recreating my Outlook profile did not help as didn't further tips found on the net. I could confirm my correct credentials 10 times in a row and the window wouldn't stop popping up immediately again. If I clicked
cancel, the prompts would reappear after a couple of minutes. This can be hugely disruptive to one's productivity.
Since I realized all had been fine since that massive roll out of updates, I began to wonder which update exactly may have caused it. My plan was to uninstall updates of that day one by one and to narrow down the culprit.
My first shot was successful:
Security Update of Microsoft Outlook 2013 (KB2837618) 32-Bit edition
When uninstalling this one, another update is removed automatically:
Update for Microsoft Office 2013 (KB2837643) 32-Bit edition
That was it. Once these guys were removed, there was finally peace again. But beware! If you have automatic Windows Updates enabled, they are quietly streamed back to your computer in a matter of minutes and the infernal prompts start again. Hence, you basically have to turn automatic updates off and then make sure these get not installed again in future.
At least until Microsoft provides a patch for the patch.
As a sidenote, I should mention that this problem only occurs for one of my 3 Exchange accounts, all with different companies (none is a Microsoft Cloud-based one). So perhaps it is the interaction of that new update AND some faulty server-side settings that are at the root of the problem, really. As I'm no sys admin, I wouldn't know how to figure it out but leave the clues given here to the experts. Very ironically, I never encountered any problems with any of my Exchange accounts on any of my Mac or iOS clients.EDIT: In the bugfix description ttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/2837618 they list under known issues: "After this update is applied, you may experience issues with S/MIME certificate verification in Microsoft Outlook. This issue is caused because the update disables remote intermediate certificate fetching in Outlook." And then they give you a registry hack to apply at your own risk. I do not know how to decipher this, do "issues with S/MIME certificate verification" give rise to the infinite loop of credential prompts?