Password Exchange account not remembered

While there are various other reasons why you password won’t be remembered, a likely reason why your password won’t be remembered for your Exchange account is because you are using Outlook Anywhere and the authentication settings have been set to Basic Authentication. Unless you can switch to using NTLM Authentication or are using Outlook 2010, you cannot set Outlook to remember your password for your Exchange account.

Outlook Anywhere

Outlook Anywhere is a method to connect to your Exchange server without being on the same network as the Exchange server. For instance, when you are connecting to your corporate mail server from home. This method is also known as RPC over HTTP.

Basic or NTLM authentication

When using Outlook Anywhere to connect to your Exchange server, there is an option for Basic Authentication and NTLM Authentication. The difference lies in the way that the passwords are encrypted when stored or communicated to the server. As Basic Authentication does not use encryption, locally stored credentials could be retrieved by any process running under that user context.

To see if you are using Basic Authentication or NTLM Authentication you can open your account settings for the Exchange server. In the account settings dialog, press on More Settings… and then select the Connection tab. At the bottom you’ll find the button for Exchange Proxy Settings.

Changing the authentication settings for Outlook Anywhere.

While you could try to change the authentication from Basic to NTML, usually it will result in you not being able to connect to the Exchange server anymore. This is because the Exchange server is most likely configured to use Basic Authentication only. You can contact your Exchange administrator and ask if it is possible to support NTML Authentication instead.

Outlook 2010 allows for saving of Basic Authentication credentials

While previous versions of Outlook did not allow for saving of credentials for accounts that use Basic Authentication, Outlook 2010 does and it allows this on either version of Windows. The option “Remember my credentials” or “Remember my password” is disabled by default though.

Outlook 2010 allows you to save passwords for accounts using Basic Authentication.

Delete stored credentials

If you do not want your Exchange credentials to be saved anymore, then you can remove them via your Windows Account settings;

• Windows XP
  Start-> Control Panel-> User Accounts-> Change an Account-> Select your own account-> in the left panel select; Manage my network passwords
• Windows Vista and Windows 7
  Start- Control Panel-> User Accounts and Family Safety-> Credential Manager

If your password is still being remembered or your credentials were not listed in the above location, then delete the Credentials folder (hidden folder) and restart your computer. You can find the Credentials folder in the following location;

• Windows XP
  C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Credentials
• Windows Vista and Windows 7
  C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Credentials