Mountain Lion and Outlook for Mac Tips and Reports

Mike Cox reports that upgrading to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) broke Outlook for Mac, causing crashes when trying to create a new folder, and disabling the ability to move messages into folders:

I installed Mountain Lion on my MB Pro with no problems. I had already loaded the most recent updates to MS Office for Mac. The only problems I have seen so far have been with Outlook. Two things: I can no longer move messages from the Inbox to a sub folder. No errors, it just doesn't move. Now everything piles up in my Inbox--kind of annoying. The work around for now is my iPhone. It will let me move messages to sub folders from the inbox. Still annoying.

The othe problem: If I try to use the "New" icon on the toolbar, it crashes Outlook. I tried to use this to create a new folder, hoping it would resolve the first problem. A hard crash every time I click on the icon or use the "File/New" drop down.

I can't find any solution on the web yet and all other Office apps work fine.

If you've seen this problem

A number of readers responded to our report "Outlook crashing, problems with Mountain Lion," all verifying the issues, some specifying different issues. Andy Burrows fixed the problem by deleting and reinstalling Office after updating to Mountain Lion:

I have experienced similar problems with Outlook crashing after updating to Mountain Lion. These happen seemingly randomly when choosing tabs like "Organize" or "Tools". Furthermore, I could not make appointments or meetings in my calendar as the two tabs are greyed out and double clicking a time slot in the calendar does absolutely nothing. This is infuriating especially as I was careful to apply all updates to Office before "upgrading" to Mountain Lion.

I got so frustrated that in the end I adopted a brute force approach; I simply did a Spotlight search for Microsoft then deleted everything that was found and reinstalled Office from scratch. Now Outlook works.

Sean Albert side the OS X 10.8.1 update had no effect:

Worked fine until I upgraded and now Outlook for Mac 2011 runs very slow and crashes frequently. Using a MacBook Pro 2.4, i7, 8 GB memory and plenty of hard drive space. Everything else works fine. It's still slow with the 10.8.1 update.

Kristine Gable can't even open Outlook after install Mountain Lion:

Yes, I've encountered the problem noted below. I suspect I'm not the only one because I've seen many posts about this issue on other sites. Since upgrading to Mountain Lion weeks ago, I've been unable to open Outlook AT ALL. The Outlook icon bounces, then stops and never opens!

Julie Chadbourne reports several symptoms:

Regarding Outlook crashing, problems with Mountain Lion, I am having the same issues. I just upgraded last week, and 4 consistent issues that I'm facing are as follows:

• Difficulty in moving emails to folders via drag and drop. I still try- and every now and then it works after 5+ times of dragging them to the new subfolder.
• Difficultly in renaming folders. The folder name doesn't stay editable long enough.
• Program crashes approximately after 10 minutes of usage. Error message received is that the database may need to be rebuilt, but no prompting to rebuild the db is received and it simply crashes.
• Meetings that I have accepted in the calendar randomly un-accept themselves from the previous day and mark themselves as tentative. Luckily, this is happening for days that have passed. Could be a possible sync issue?

Craig Mayeux is crashing:

I too have the same issues as the guy in your article. After upgrading mail crashes hard when creating a new message.