MS Office 2011 for Macs user on MacBook Pro using MacOS 10.8.5

Recently, a user in our area had their Exchange password expire. After changing the password and using it for a week, Outlook began to rebuff all attempts at retrieving mail with the following error message:

"Mail could not be received at this time. The server account for "company" returned the error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password." Your username/password or security settings may be incorrect. Would you like to try reentering your password?"

If, like us, you went through following steps:

1. Re-enter the password, making sure the caps lock is off and you are entering it correctly

2. Make sure your password is good by using it to access other Exhange server areas. (Such as successful direct access to a volume or successfully logging into Outlook Web App. IOW, webmail.)

3. Reconfirm your account settings.

4. Have your IT specialist reset your password.

5. Delete or repair keychains that pertain to the Exchange server.

6. Refresh the cache in your browsers that may be storing passwords that are conflicting with the Exchange server. "Just in case."

7. Deleted and re-established the balky account in Outlook.

...and you are still being rebuffed over and over by Outlook, you might try:

8. Rebuilding your database using the Microsoft Database Utility found in the MS Office 2011 applications folder.

9. Upgrading Outlook using the Check for Updates feature under Help in Outlook's menu bar.

After Solution 8 and/or 9: quit Outlook; shutdown; restart; launch Outlook; and try to log in with your good password. (And personally, in situations like these, I like turning off all launch-at-login items so that an application we're trying to repair has every chance to launch and perform without any kind of user-prompted machine interference.)

We had the user in our case upgrade their Outlook in a last-ditch attempt before doing an uninstall/reinstall. Rebuilding the database occurred to us, but we decided against it since it never prompted us to do that—if that was really the problem. During the upgrade process, we were prompted to rebuild the database. Rebuilding the database during an upgrade has never happened before that I can recall. Usually, Outlook will prompt you on its own to re-build a bad database, though there is a utility in the MS Office 2011 applications folder that you can use to do that whenever you like.

After our upgrade/database rebuild, Outlook began to repopulate the account with all the stored e-mail and updating with new messages. So…problem solved!

FYI to anyone with similar problems. The mods can keep, amend, or delete this post however they see fit!

Thanks for reading, I hope one of these options works for you!