Support for commercial software



  • I have a MSN Live Microsoft-account. Originally, like 15 years ago, I registered it to use MSN Messenger. But I did not want a Hotmail mail account, so I just registered a MSN account with my other e-mail address "grunnen@gmx.de".

    Fast-forward to 2014. I buy a Windows Phone and use this Microsoft-account to log on to it. Especially the calendar integration is nice, so at work I take the "Hotmail connector" to connect Outlook 2007 to the calendar so that I can drag-and-drop my work appointments to my phone.

    Forward to 2015. Upgrade to Office 2013. It does not need the connector anymore. However, automatic configuration is useless, because Outlook interprets my user name as an e-mail address and tries to connect to "gmx.de", which fails. Solution: manual configuration for "Service compatible with outlook.com or Exchange ActiveSync".

    Forward to 2016/2017. Microsoft has decided to migrate all accounts to a new server which is supposedly compatible to regular Exchange. If you log in using the old way, you just receive a single e-mail message "You need to reconnect Outlook to your account."

    Problem: When "reconnecting", automatic configuration fails (because of the aforementioned reason) and I don't know the parameters for manual configuration to connect to the new server (and in Office 2016, manual configuration of a regular Exchange connection won't be possible anymore at all).

    Attempt at solution: Chat support from Microsoft with LogMeIn remote access. First-level support in India insisted to set up an IMAP connection to "gmx.de". After repeating again and again that I want a connection to my Microsoft Outlook.com calendar and not to my gmx.de email, I got escalated to second level support. "Working" solution after one hour: an IMAP connection to outlook.com, of course without calendar support. Clearly they also haven't got the slightest clue.

    Attemt 2 at a solution: create a hosts file that redirects autodiscover.gmx.de to the IP address of autodiscover.outlook.com. That works, but finally leads to the error "The action cannot be completed. the name cannot be matched to a name in the address list."

    Attempt 3 at a solution / workaround: create an extra alias in my Microsoft account in the form of "grunnen@outlook.de" so that autodiscover should work normally. But no: "The action cannot be completed. the name cannot be matched to a name in the address list."

    Of course I am not the only one having this problem:

    But as usual on the Microsoft Community forums: no solution.

    Okay, attempt 4 at a solution / workaround: create an extra alias in my Microsoft account in the form of "grunnen_addition_because_username_already_in_use@outlook.com". And yes, it works. Sort of.

    But first: Why does Microsoft not even configure autodiscovery properly for all of their own servers?

    Second: Why is the account name shown as something like "outlook_1234ABCD5678FEDC@outlook.com"? How can I configure everything so that the proper sender ("grunnen@gmx.de") will show up if I accidentally send an e-mail from Outlook using this account? Well, MS support does have something about that:

    0_1486120047623_upload-2dc36f8d-ac19-4ba1-8288-ca94c35c8215

    Okay, great. And what side effects will that workaround have?

    Why can't a company with billions in cash make sure that this work smoothly?


  • FoxDev

    @Grunnen said in Support for commercial software:

    Why can't a company with billions in cash make sure that this work smoothly?

    I've been using MS software and dev tools for about two decades, and I can confirm that they just love to over-complicate things.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Grunnen said in Support for commercial software:

    Why can't a company with billions in cash make sure that this work smoothly?

    They've never really comprehended that people might have email accounts on systems that MS don't control, or that isn't at least running Exchange.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @dkf said in Support for commercial software:

    @Grunnen said in Support for commercial software:

    Why can't a company with billions in cash make sure that this work smoothly?

    They've never really comprehended that people might have email accounts on systems that MS don't control, or that isn't at least running Exchange.

    To be fair, I recently had this problem with a Google account. When it was created, our email host wasn't Google. Still worked fine, nothing to see here.

    Then we migrated to Google Apps, and that email actually existed (in the form of a Google Group). Now, you can't use a Groups email address as a login name (for somewhat obvious reasons), so we immediately lost access to the account and couldn't sign in.

    Jumping through several hoops, I managed to sign in and re-assign the login to the email address pr+youtube@[redatced]?com. And that works just fine. :facepalm: . So now the Groups account technically has a YouTube account too. But it's special.

    Luckily the people who actually use the account don't bat an eye when I explained the situation.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Tsaukpaetra said in Support for commercial software:

    problem with a Google account.

    Oh FFS, speaking of, apparently someone needed to get into it just a bit ago:

    0_1486325621343_upload-081d05d6-faa1-465a-bc2a-0c7aa9b6de8f

    :facepalm: Turns out 2FA isn't actually enabled, but still sent a ping to Borg for being "suspicious activity".

    Yeah, not logging in for months at a time is definitely suspicious, guys...



  • @Grunnen In reading your post I didn't see any mention about Exchange "user name".
    I completed the "reconnect" process for my Outlook 2016.
    However, the Exchange Server "User Name" appears as my email address.
    How can I change that to show my proper name?
    0_1486901426994_Change Account.jpg


  • FoxDev

    @HarvMan said in Support for commercial software:

    How can I change that to show my proper name?

    You don't. You don't need to: your real name will get attached to the emails you send anyway ;)



  • @RaceProUK It will show the sender as e.g. "Firstname Lastname <outlook_ABCD1234FFFF6789@outlook.com>".

    As for me, I don't care as I should not send emails this way anyways, but for someone else it might not be desired.

    The "workaround" for this is in the screenshot in my opening post.



  • @Tsaukpaetra said in Support for commercial software:

    @dkf said in Support for commercial software:

    @Grunnen said in Support for commercial software:

    Why can't a company with billions in cash make sure that this work smoothly?

    They've never really comprehended that people might have email accounts on systems that MS don't control, or that isn't at least running Exchange.

    To be fair, I recently had this problem with a Google account. When it was created, our email host wasn't Google. Still worked fine, nothing to see here.

    Then we migrated to Google Apps, and that email actually existed (in the form of a Google Group). Now, you can't use a Groups email address as a login name (for somewhat obvious reasons), so we immediately lost access to the account and couldn't sign in.

    Jumping through several hoops, I managed to sign in and re-assign the login to the email address pr+youtube@[redatced]?com. And that works just fine. :facepalm: . So now the Groups account technically has a YouTube account too. But it's special.

    Luckily the people who actually use the account don't bat an eye when I explained the situation.

    I have the same problem with my Google Mail account. I got it back in the days when you had to be invited to get a Gmail account. This was through a hosted service where the site owner had like 500 accounts he could give out. Lovely bonus:

    I can't use any of the Google features (e.g., create a library using Google Print), nor can I even get into the account now, since it keeps sending the verification email to that account, and if I try to create a plain old Gmail account with my username it says it's already in use.

    Bonus #2: Calling customer support for an email account doesn't work because they won't give out any of that information over the phone. I guess that makes sense, in some way. But then again, this is Google, who was once supposed to be one of the good guys.

    Good thing I've pretty much abandoned that account.

    Thanks, Google.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @slavdude said in Support for commercial software:

    create a library using Google Print

    WTF is that? That doesn't sound like Cloud Print...



  • @RaceProUK Pretty much. Trying to navigate team services on VS online is a total head fuck and I've been using it for two years.



  • @Tsaukpaetra said in Support for commercial software:

    @slavdude said in Support for commercial software:

    create a library using Google Print

    WTF is that? That doesn't sound like Cloud Print...

    AKA Google Scholar.


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