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Outlook 2016 OSX requires activation?

Duncan Epping · Mar 9, 2015 ·

I ran in to this issue where Outlook 2016 for OSX said it required to be activated. Very annoying as I don’t have a 365 account and that is what it requires before you can use it. It seems that this problem was caused by the fact that I used an older version of the preview/beta in the past. It can simply be solved be taking the following steps:

  1. Open Terminal
  2. Type: defaults delete com.microsoft.Outlook
  3. Type: killall cfprefsd
  4. Exit the Terminal session and launch Outlook

This basically deletes all the current settings for Outlook and wipes the cache. Now you can enter your details again and it will all work as expected.

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Comments

  1. Zach Gelnett (@zachg99) says

    11 March, 2015 at 00:45

    Thanks, this helped me!

  2. Sami Laakkonen says

    18 March, 2015 at 09:16

    Thank you! Finally my issue with activation is also solved! 🙂

  3. moo says

    6 April, 2015 at 17:35

    Nice job! and thank you.

  4. Soul Man says

    15 April, 2015 at 10:59

    Life saver

  5. Simon V says

    15 April, 2015 at 20:11

    Worked for me then outlook crashed. Had to start over again.
    Every-time i quit and restart i need to do it again.
    I should note that i have outlook 2011 installed as well, but don’t run it anymore.

  6. saba says

    13 June, 2015 at 22:37

    hi
    Any Time quitting cause the activation problem
    How to make it as an automator

  7. Todd Egland says

    29 June, 2015 at 23:58

    Excellent! Thank you for providing this easy fix.

  8. joris says

    30 June, 2015 at 09:40

    Thanks!

  9. Lee says

    30 June, 2015 at 10:13

    Thanks for this Duncan, our whole office got affected by this issue. I dont believe it matters about downloading preview before or not, as I have installed Outlook for Mac on brand new machines and ran into the same error.

  10. Denise Chen says

    17 July, 2015 at 06:42

    Hi Duncan, i followed your tips but it doesn’t seem to work for me. I don’t get any hints to relaunch outlook, any idea why? My outlook still asking to activate, my MAC is new and i haven’t installed any older version before but only the 2016, wouldn’t wanna pay to subscribe office 365:-) thanks

  11. beasy says

    28 August, 2015 at 03:21

    Did not work at all for me either, running Yosemite on 2008 Macbook Pro??

  12. David Lambl says

    7 October, 2015 at 05:19

    Thanks! Exactly what I was looking for.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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