In my last post, I covered an. After fixing the issue, I noticed that Outlook was behaving oddly including: • Calendar was not updating • All Calendar invites/updates/removals arrived as empty messages • Any time I deleted an email it would shortly reappear in the same folder • If I selected a message that had reappeared, it would magically disappear shortly thereafter What was going on? Read on to learn more! This time I could easily check the logs so I did, but unfortunately they did not report any issues.

I, of course, ensured I was running the latest version of Office and then did what Microsoft typically recommends — manually uninstall and manually reinstall Office for Mac 2016. Unfortunately, this process is not as user friendly as I hoped () and requires you to manually delete the following: • All Office applications in the Applications folder • The following Library containers: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.* • The following Library group containers: ~/Library/Group Containers/UB* Finally you need to restart the computer. After completing this, I reinstalled Office, but the problem persisted. Next up, I enabled troubleshooting logging.

I can get my calendar and contacts on my phone, but not on my Mac. Please make it possible for me to see my calendar and contacts on Mac desktop clients. Gmail can sync my calendar and contacts to my Mac desktop applications, which makes it very difficult for me to use Outlook.com instead of Gmail.

To do this, you go to Tools > Sync Errors > Gear Icon > Turn on logging for troubleshooting. Then you need to close Outlook and open it again — wish it would state that. Then you reproduce the issue and check the logs — the big question is where are the logs? Unfortunately, Outlook does not tell you this either, but you can find it in: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.outlook/Data/Library/Logs. Tailing this log while reproducing the issue will result in a lot of output. What I eventually realized is that you need to look for messages that contain the word “Unexpected” — Microsoft would it kill you to adhere to syslog RFC standards is use something like “error”? — note using grep on the file did not work for me so I used vim and its search capabilities to look for Unexpected messages. Outlook for mac 2016 showing messages as readings.

The first set of Unexpected messages I received looked like the following. $ > sudo chown - R Outlook and all my Outlook problems went away! (Note: Remember to turn off troubleshooting logging in Outlook) I still do not know what was responsible for changing the permissions on my files and directories, but I do know I wasted a bunch of time because: • Default error logging was not sufficient • Debug error logging was hard to turn on and the log file was hard to find • The log file did not use standard terminology for reporting errors, used codes that were not defined, did not support normal CLI commands such as grep, and did not contain critical pieces of information such as filepath The morale of this story? Logging is important; make logging easy, follow common standards and include relevant pieces of information. All rights reserved.