There I was, doing homework or something, when I see a handful of important-ish emails pop up on my phone. I don’t want to deal with anything requiring more than a passing acknowledgement on a mobile device, and I’m sitting right there at my laptop, so I fire up Outlook.
I’m greeted with this:
Something went wrong? That’s all you have for me? I need my emails. What on earth are you complaining about. Nothing has changed on any of my connected accounts in months, and now Outlook refuses to talk to one of them.
I search high and low, and there’s almost nothing on the internet that references 7q6ch. That looks like a Web Account Manager dialogue box, but none of my tokens should need any sort of attention. Whatever. I sign out of the offending account from Word, close every Office app, then fire up Outlook again. It pushes a notification to my MS Authenticator, I approve, and everyone is happy. For like two weeks.
After a reboot, I sit down to get some work done, and Outlook starts throwing 7q6ch again and again. Of my 5 accounts, Outlook now can’t connect to three of them. (It had also stopped being able to digitally sign emails from one specific account, even though the certificate is still valid for another year.) I sign out of each account and relaunch Outlook – no luck.
I reboot – 7q6ch.
I create a new Outlook profile – 7q6ch.
Super. I need to completely reset ADAL or WAM or something, and Microsoft’s articles on that sort of thing amount to DON’T TURN THOSE OFF, EVER, so that’s helpful.
After a little searching, I find this Learn article on microsoft.com about resetting the Office activation state. Not exactly what I need, but it does include a link to a PowerShell script called signoutofwamaccounts.ps1.
(That’s Windows PowerShell, not PowerShell 7. I’m really getting sick of that differentiation.)
I close Outlook, fire up Terminal, and run .\signoutofwamaccounts.ps1:
PS C:\Users\push\Desktop> .\signoutofwamaccounts.ps1
PS C:\Users\push\Desktop>
It does its thing in the background and returns…nothing. Yay?
I reopen Outlook, and I’m greeted with a properly functioning authentication request. Finally, I can deal with an insurance agent and some dipshit from a car dealership!