resolve mac office 2016 unkown error and activation issues

how to fix outlook 2016 activation problems without deleting downloaded emails

the solution:

1. Download: outlook-activation.command.zip

2. Double click to extract the outlook-activation.command file
3. Double click to run the extracted outlook-activation.command file
4. here’s what you should expect to see if it worked correctly:

   

   1. If you can’t open the .command file, you will have to set your OS X security preferences to allow content from “untrusted developers” or just open terminal and run these commands yourself (simply copy and paste):
      
      
      killall “Office365ServiceV2”
      
      cd ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office
      
      ls -a | perl -n -e ‘print if m/^[e|c]\w/’ | xargs rm

   
   

5. now, you’ll be prompted to activate the next time you try to send recieve, or you can start activation from the outlook menu manually.  now, just type in your office 365 username and password to activate, and you should no longer get activation or unknown errors 🙂

   

these steps should work for activation issues with word, excel, or powerpoint 2016 as well.

the technical details

several users at work have been running the office 365 outlook 2016 for mac beta for months. i noticed a lot of the time, users were hitting this issue after traveling, and have found these steps worked for a variety of different error codes and unknown error conditions.

now that office 2016 for mac is out there seem to be a lot of people running into activation issues (a few example links, with the one I found these steps in at the bottom):

https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/153/t/357390

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macofficeo365-macinstall/outlook-2016-for-mac-was-not-activation-with-my/080fd266-2d86-4024-afe9-f6b4d40d1088

https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/153/t/276178

https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/156/t/281997

from what i’ve been able to tell, this is related to timezones– seems users who aren’t using os x’s built-in feature to automatically update timezone have a lot of problems with outlook “forgetting” that it has been activated.    once this happens, outlook will be stuck in offline mode where you can’t send or receive messages or update outlook.

my best advice to avoid this issue or make sure it doesn’t happen again is to be sure to enable the os x system preferences for automatically determining time zone:

for the several users i’ve seen hit this issue so far, 3 commands clear the activation cache and allow you to re-activate without having to download all your mails again. i’ve made these into a .command file you can simply download, extract, and run.

Download: outlook-activation.command.zip

here are the exact contents of the .command file, which is derived from the steps published12/9/2014 1:50 AM by MS support author Rene Yu.

—————–

#!/bin/bash

killall “Office365ServiceV2”

cd ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office

ls -a | perl -n -e ‘print if m/^[e|c]\w/’ | xargs rm

——————

hope this helps!