If you have recently tried launching Outlook Desktop, there’s a probability that you might have encountered some challenges such as it failing to respond and shutting down or crashing. Microsoft has come out and confirmed that they are aware of the issue. After further investigation into the matter, Microsoft found out that the error occurs when the EmailAddress string data value under the Office identity is blank. We also recently saw Uber receipts crash Outlook on Windows when users are trying to open emails with complex tables.
Microsoft presented two instances, first up when the issue occurs causing Outlook to stop responding.
They also presented an instance where Outlook is functioning properly with the EmailAddress string data value under Office filled.
You can use this registry path to check for this: Registry path: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\Identities
As Microsoft continues to work on a fix for this issue, they have provided a couple of workarounds that you can use to bypass it and get Outlook to function normally. First up, Microsoft recommends that affected users should sign out of Office and then sign back in which will in turn repopulate the identity registry settings.
If this does not work for you, then you can try turning Support Diagnostics off. This will turn off the option to submit In App ticket using Help, Contact Support as well as the feature path that causes Outlook to crash.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\General]
“DisableSupportDiagnostics”=dword:00000001
And finally, you can try to manually set the email address to the identity of the user that is seeing the issue in the registry path as highlighted above. We will be sure to keep an eye out for Microsoft’s fix and keep you posted. Be sure to also check out Outlook on Windows’ new location for the mail, calendar, people, and apps modules.