Follow these steps to let Outlook diagnose and fix errors in your Outlook mail profile that might be causing the issue. You can create a new Outlook Data File and drag the items in the Lost and Found folder into the new data file. After you’ve moved all the items, you can remove the Recovered Personal Folders (.pst) file, including the Lost and Found folder. To create a new Outlook Data File, go to Create an Outlook Data File. The steps to access the repair tool vary depending on your operating system. If you can’t open Outlook, or Outlook disappears or crashes, one of your add-ins may be to blame or you may need to update Outlook.

To import contacts from other email services, export contacts, or clean up duplicate contacts, select an option from the Manage contacts menu. Add a contact to your Favorites by selecting a contact in the list, and then selecting Add to favorites. When you add someone as a favorite in People, they’ll also show up under Favorites in Mail, and the other way around, provided that the contact has an email address. There might also be a visual alert that a message is unread, has an attachment, or is flagged. This is a lightweight app designed to handle multiple accounts and fairly moderate email use. Having trouble connecting to your email from Outlook on your desktop?

A status message appears at the bottom of the message list while Outlook is syncing. For more information, please go to Sync to manually check for new mail and to send messages in Outlook. Outlook stores all your email messages, meetings and events, contacts, and tasks in data files. You can run the Inbox Repair Tool (scanpst.exe) to scan your Outlook data files and repair errors. Are you having trouble starting Outlook or receiving “Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window” error messages? We can fix the problem for you, or you can use the troubleshooting steps we’re providing below to help resolve these startup issues.

If you can send email while Outlook is in safe mode, creating a new Outlook email profile should allow you to send email again. Should you decide to remove a profile, back up the data files first. All offline cached content will be deleted when you choose Remove. For more information, see Introduction to Outlook Data Files (.pst and .ost).

I am not quite sure when this started, otherwise I would have rolled back updates and/or removed recently installed apps. I recently uninstalled and reinstalled Office but it only made the issue worse. In System Configuration, if you select a check box, the related service or startup program runs when you restart the computer. If the check box is cleared, the service or startup program doesn’t run when you restart the computer.

The information below covers issues with the Outlook desktop add-in pertaining to installing, updating, tracking and notifications, and obtaining debug logs. Get Help has troubleshooters for classic Outlook you can run for many common scenarios. If a troubleshooter is available for your issue, select Start to run that troubleshooter. Use the classic Outlook startup troubleshooter to resolve issues when classic Outlook for Windows is unable to start. Despite its popularity, Outlook is still software, and like all software, bugs, issues, and errors can occur visit Fix Outlook Site at any time. Given Outlook’s popularity, we’ve decided to create a Hub especially dedicated to this particular topic where we will be providing you will all manners of troubleshooting guides.

A Repair Account window will prompt you for your email address and password. Then it will run a program to diagnose the network connection problem. Add-ins are a pretty frequent culprit for Outlook lagging issues because they are meant to provide additional functionality, but they put additional pressure on loading time.

After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide free software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10. Your PC will still work, visit Fix Outlook Site but we recommend moving to Windows 11.

Occasionally, classic Outlook tries to run a process in the background. Auto-archive, sending and receiving a very large attachment, or running some of the other mailbox tools can all be done in the background. Check the status bar at the bottom of the screen to see if another process is running.

If Outlook won’t open, you can’t check your incoming messages or send an outgoing one from your desktop. You cannot create a new email address with @live.com as the domain address. You cannot create a new email with visit Fix Outlook Site @msn.com as the domain address. Existing Hotmail accounts have been permitted to keep their email addresses as well. If Microsoft Outlook is not working, we might be able to help you pinpoint why.

To check if you have received the fix, review your contact list to confirm duplicates have been removed. To help you get rid of these duplicates, we have released a fix which will automatically clean up your contact list. This fix will clean up duplicate contacts for end users starting August 9, 2023.