Over on the Outlook Live forums today we discovered a very strange issue with Outlook 2010’s account setup preventing Exchange autodiscover from working for some domains. If your domain starts with “live.” then the Autodiscover and Guessmart processes don’t even kick in. You get prompted straight away to install the Hotmail Connector:
As you can see in the above example the domain doesn’t even exist. A NetMon trace shows no attempt to check the domain to somehow link it to Hotmail, and if you use the Test E-Mail Auto configuration utility it follows the “real” logic and doesn’t alert you to this problem.
Any information on exactly why this does this isn’t already out there – the closest I’ve come to an answer is over on the Outlook blog, here. If you know more – feel free to leave a comment. In the meantime I’ll be doing some more research.
Update 1 27/05/2010 – I have a solution from Microsoft for the issue. Just waiting for confirmation before I post.
Update 2 01/06/2010 – Workaround below:
NB: The following instructions are for use at your own risk. If you aren’t sure what you are doing, get a professional to assist and always ensure you have an up-to-date backup that you know how to restore.
Open Registry Editor and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\AutoConfigDomains
Remove the following key:
live.*
This will of course make it so name@live.com will not autoconfigure with the Hotmail Connector.
If you want that that to still work change the Key name to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\AutoConfigDomains\live.com
I sincerely hope they sort this with an update, and change it for future versions of Outlook. This is causing a massive headache with students trying to set up their email using their home pcs 🙁
through the streets of the city, only their pudenda covered, as they had gone beyond any sense of shame. Each carried a leather lash in his hand and hit himself on the shoulders till blood came; and they were shedding abundant tears as if they saw with their own eyes the Passion of the Savior;
Hi Brian,
I guess you could export the relevant registry key to a reg file, then use a GPO to run a computer login script which runs regedit /s the_file.reg – silently importing the update into the registry.
Steve
Any ideas how to automate the registry fixup for naive users? I’ve opened a support ticket with Microsoft to see what they say …