Microsoft: Outlook desktop app crashing due to missing identity setting Outlook sometimes goes wrong and even Microsoft occasionally can't work out why, judging by a freshly published Microsoft 365 support article. The article is related to that most common of Outlook (Desktop) ailments: "Outlook closes shortly after it is opened." In our experience, the problem tends to be accompanied by a terse …
Sounds like their usual quality, to be honest.
I hate Outlook with a vengeance, it's not even a particularly great email or calendaring client and it really only has two things to do: email and calendaring!
I don't get the obsession with it and I would be happy to never have to manage it again and haven't used it personally for years now.
The whole profile-on-the-local-machine thing is so archaic too, it really needs to just die and become nothing more than a small cache of the server content that in the case of problems, one click and you start afresh from server-only data.
And programs that forcibly integrate with it or MAPI should be shot on sight. It's the only kindness you can afford them.
Your profile is now synched with the cloud settings. You don't download everything - just a date range you specify.
If you want to feel real hate, try the PWA version. Doesn't stay as PWA all the time, having an odd habit of launching browser windows for some options, but not for others. Then there's the problem of switching between calendar and email - why so slow?
There are several hundred things that annoy me about Outlook. One is that it contains an inferior clone of Lotus Organizer - Organizer was brilliant but for some reason they refused to integrate it with... anything, ever.
Then there's the crashing. Outlook and Excel seem to have a competition of who can go the most wrong this week.
The constant UI nonsense - I dread any updates as they nearly always break my workflow because some intern in Microsoft's soi-disant "design" department decided it would look prettier if they moved everything around and changed the shade of green or something equally nonsense.
I could go on, but I suspect it would be a good idea if I didn't - for the sake of my blood pressure, if nothing else.
that makes it worthwhile having a managed support contract.
Last year, I was working on a Kaseya administered estate. Due to a fuckup with their documentation*, a supposed update managed to install shed loads of crap on over 100 PCs.
My first contact with their customer support was along the lines of "yes ... and at no extra cost".
As I started to look at undoing the damage, it turned out that (a) they had no rollback (not quite what they told our IT director when he was researching) and each app would need a custom script.
Luckily we had a managed service contract with their reseller, and (despite some protests) they did the 16+ hours worth of work to fix things).
"We do not know why the EmailAddress key is not being set properly,"
Wrong question. Why is the EmailAddress key being set _at all_? If it has a value, which one presumes it did as of yesterday, just use it.
My guess is MS is looking for the domain account -- this is 2022 after all. Not finding one, MS dutifully inserts the null email address.
So that's like three logic errors in one bug. Good work.
I have 7 MS accounts. That regedit address has 7 entries under some weird entry (one starts with 453d96a9-eb0c-48c8-9f8f-a9b1...). So, I can see why they want it and I can see why it might crash if they don't have one. But it shouldn't CRASH - it should come up and ask for an email address (and maybe password) if the entry has disappeared.
Alan
"God, I have the registry..."
If you've been diagnosed as having a case of the Registry, your doctor can prescribe any of a number of alternative operating systems and apps to clear up your condition. You may experience some discomfort during the healing process, but the end result is well-worth it.
With a sprawling monstrosity that's accreted over decades like Outlook there is so much crap going on during the startup sequence (and I bet they don't fully understand what order everything is happening in) that it's no surprise at all that something is stepping on something else's toes.
The crash is easy enough - it expects something in that registry directory, and it's not error checking that it found something before trying to read it, so boom *null reference error*.
Now why is there nothing there? Somebody probably added some new cleanup / sanity checking code elsewhere that ends up wiping it, then It Works On My Machine (TM) so let's push it worldwide.
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