I have been using Windows Live Mail 2012 as my email client for years. Due to Microsoft changes I decided to switch to Outlook 2016. I have installed Office 365 Personal, taking advantage of the free one year subscription, although I am considering cancelling and deleting it and purchasing the standalone Outlook 2016 product. When I registered for this forum I selected Office 2016 as my product since Office 365 Personal is not an option.



I have been trying for days to set up Outlook 2016, with no success. I've researched every article and forum I can find for answers, to no avail. I've downloaded every troubleshooter and analytical tool I can find while trying to configure Outlook 2016. I've read every tutorial I can find. I am trying to set up Outlook 2016 for two sbcglobal.net accounts and several live.com, msn.com, outlook.com and windowslive.com email accounts. One of my windowslive.com accounts is also my Microsoft email account.

I can't import WLM email accounts or email messages from WLM into Outlook 2016. I can't export WLM email accounts or email messages into Outlook 2016. I've received just about every error message imaginable, including "The export could not be performed. Your default MAPI store could not be opened.", "Cannot connect to server", "Oops, something went wrong" and other error messages.

I have received the test messages sent from Outlook 2016 to the sbcglobal.net email accounts but that's as good as it gets, which makes me wonder why I get a "Cannot connect to server" error message for the sbcglobal.net accounts while there's clearly "test messages" in the sbcglobal.net Inbox. I have attempted to set up a profile with Outlook 2016 but that's a no go also. I have tried to manually set up the email accounts in Outlook 2016 but that was unsuccessful. I have set Outlook 2016 as my default email client so that's not the problem. I have tried importing/exporting with both WLM 2012 and Outlook 2016 open and running so that's not the problem. I can't access the Import function in Outlook 2016 because I can't create a profile or set up my first account.

I am very familiar with setting up email accounts in email clients. I've done it successfully for years with WLM and I've also done it with Thunderbird, which I deleted after the first setup because I didn't like it. I don't have any problems with entering the correct server port numbers, authentication, the correct server type, SSL, incoming and outgoing addresses and so forth.

Why am I unable to export to Outlook, import from within Outlook or manually set up these email accounts? I simply can't understand what the problem is.

Thank you in advance for your time and any assistance provided.

I finally managed to successfully "add" the sbcglobal.net account into Outlook 2016. I had to click on "More Settings" in the configuration window, enable "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication and also enable "use same settings as my incoming mail server". However, I was unable to import any of the Microsoft email accounts into Outlook 2016 from WLM. I then attempted again to "export" all my messages from WLM into Outlook 2016 and was successful. Exporting from WLM did not work before and I can only assume that the reason it didn't work is that I hadn't yet set up my first account in Outlook 2016.

I did encounter a problem when I exported all the Microsoft accounts to Outlook 2016. They did not export as individual accounts listed with the sbcglobal.net account. They ended up in the "outlook data file". I now have to expand the outlook data file if I want to access these Microsoft email accounts. How do I get them listed as their own individual email accounts in Outlook 2016 instead of being buried in the outlook data file?