Solving an Outlook.com and Outlook Authentication Problem

February 20, 2014

I’ve been trying off and on for some time now to add my Outlook.com account which I use for personal email to Outlook 2013 so that I can see both my personal and professional calendars side-by-side in Outlook. I’ve used this set up for years but recently it stopped working. Every time I tried to add it Outlook would return an error.

Log onto Exchange ActiveSync mail server (EAS): The username or password you entered isn't working. Please try typing them again.

Now I know this worked before and for the life of me I could figure out what changed. I did some searching and often found others with the same problem. What I couldn’t find was a solution. Until now.

In one of those face-palm moments I realized what changed. I had enabled Two-step verification to my Microsoft ID a while back. Anyone who has done this (and everyone should) will know that some apps don’t work with two-step and require a special “App Password” (Your Xbox Live account on the Xbox 360 is a common example). Sure enough, I generated an App Password and used that instead of my actual password and it just worked.

In detail, here is how to configure user when using Two-Step verification:

With EAS you can get your email immediately, as well as see all your folders, calendar and contacts in one place. If your email app supports Exchange ActiveSync and you need to configure it manually, use the following settings.

Hopefully this post will show up in enough search results that others can avoid this problem in the future.