Lisa Hendrickson is the owner of Call That Girl. She is an Outlook Expert and Microsoft 365 Consultant.
Contacting the server for informationClient called in saying they try to open an Outlook email and get this box and then their Outlook goes crazy. Black screen, then freezes, then finally opens the email.
Cause of this: Whoever is sending you an email, has an image stored on a server that needs to download in your Outlook.
This is not common but it seems to stem from companies like Dell mostly, Google drive maybe too. I first saw this with Paypal years ago.
Fix: I did all my usual tricks and even tried a regedit fix. The regedit worked but then it turned off viewing images in my Outlook for every email. No way around that. My fix is to let that email download, get the information you need, save to your computer and then delete it for good. This is not a common problem and this is what I will tell my clients moving forward.
If you need my help with other issues, please contact me with the form below.
My client called in trying to open Outlook and got the above error. I fixed it by updating Office in Microsoft Word on the desktop. If that fails for you, try other google searches, but this fixed it for me! If you need my help, use the form below. Thanks!
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For many years I didn’t consider it an option until I had one client who needed an inbox to read all the email from his nine email accounts. After some testing, I found the eMClient to do this and much more. In fact, I use it myself now for my other non business email accounts! I’m not giving up on Outlook but for some of my clients, I have been offering eMClient now as an alternative and for what they need, it will work fine. Outlook is changing features everyday now too and it’s frustrating people.
Here are a few of the advantages over Outlook
As an Outlook Expert, I help clients everyday with confusing Outlook issues. Many times, I find their problem stems from OneDrive. Outlook files are not supposed to be in OneDrive, not the main PST or any data files at all. I usually have to move the PST files off OneDrive to the C drive’s documents. Why is this? OneDrive is a constantly synchronizing program (not a backup solution) and with it constantly working, Outlook is working too, so a PST corruption is bound to happen. I never recommend having two computers using OneDrive with Outlook, this is definitely a disaster waiting to happen!
In my blog here, I will help you figure out if your data (not just PST files) is in OneDrive and how it happened and how we can help you move them out of OneDrive to your local computer.
When you buy a new computer, most folks set it up themselves. At the Windows screen to start setup, you were asked to create an account or use a local account. The local account is usually much smaller and not so easy to see. This is the Microsoft trap to get you to setup an account with them and this is what most of my clients do. They create a new Microsoft Windows account, which is really an Outlook.com account. You get email, OneDrive, and many other free Office 365 apps. Didn’t know that I bet? You do now. Then when you go to transfer your data, it all goes to the documents folder as you hoped, but that folder is now “OneDrive/Documents” which is really, “all your files are now on Microsoft servers” and you probably didn’t know that either. Your Outlook PST files are probably moved there as well.
So yep, you now have 2 documents folders. Fun huh? My computer name is “Envy” so just replace “Envy” with your computer name and your documents folder should be here C:\Users\Envy\Documents. If you have OneDrive it will look like this C:\Users\Envy\OneDrive\Documents
Another way to check is open a Word document and go to save it. Go to the browse button and in the folder window, put your mouse there and it will show you what folder your default is.
If its OneDrive, you can change the default save location back to Documents. Want to get completely rid of OneDrive? There is not enough space in this blog for me to write out all the instructions. This blog was more or less an outline for you to figure it out. You can move the data yourself, but you still have OneDrive. Most of my clients have us completely remove OneDrive. Approximate time is 1 hour, might go into 2 hours.
One final tip
An easy way to check to see if your computer has OneDrive installed when you setup, is go to the Accounts area in your settings. Your computer name is at the top and it will say Local Account or an email. If you see an email, then your account is setup with OneDrive. It’s up to you to change it, I’m just letting you know. This is especially important if your company is a law firm, medical, etc. And a final note, this is why some folks have Outlook issues, they are signed in their Windows account with their business email. I fix these issues most of the time and then find the OneDrive issue too.
Feel free to leave a reply below. Thanks!
Here is the latest “reg fix” if your Exchange account is not setting up in Outlook. There are about 50 other things to try but I’ll put this as my top one as it’s fixed a most recent client issue. Thanks to AppRiver for helping assist on this.
The registry key specifically bypasses Modern Authentication as Microsoft is currently doing some work on that feature. So the underlying issue was that Modern Authentication was preventing the password prompt in Outlook from appearing. Once the registry key was added the password prompt appeared and the profile setup was successful.
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\
Type: REG_DWORD
Value Name: EnableADAL
Value data: 0
Desktop Level Troubleshooting
Profile testing
Registry Changes
Other efforts worth trying
If this all fails, downgrade Outlook. I do this usually if my efforts don’t work in the first 30 min.
