Mail (microsoft outlook 2016) application not found

Office 365,

When migrating a customer to Office 365 I had a problem opening the mail control panel applet. It simply showed the error message “Application not found”:

Error message when trying to run the mail applet from Microsoft Outlook 2016 "Application not found"

This seemed to be occurring on 64-Bit machines where we had installed 32-Bit Office 2016 from the Office 365 portal.

I found two workarounds for this:

Workaround One: Run the mail applet directly from the command line

  1. Press Windows Key + R to bring up the run dialog
  2. Paste the following:
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\MLCFG32.CPL

Workaround Two: Run the mail applet from Outlook 2016

If you in Outlook you can run the control panel mail applet from within Outlook by going to File and clicking on account settings, at the bottom of the account settings drop down you should see a “Manage Profiles” button, which will take you into the mail applet.
Manage mail profiles from within Outlook 2016

I would like to find a proper solution for why this is happening, so if anyone comes across a solution, I’d appreciate it if you share your solution.

Exclude messages from Clutter in Office 365 using a transport rule

How To, Office 365, , ,

This post shows you create a transport rule to exclude messages from clutter and provides the code for you to do it automatically. Clutter is a great feature of Office 365 and allows you to focus on the emails that are important to you, but sometimes you need to see emails even if they don’t really require any attention.

Example: Exclude message from clutter based on the email subject

New-TransportRule -Name "Tachytelic Test Rule" -SubjectContainsWords "Sample Subject to bypass clutter" -SetHeaderName "X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter" -SetHeaderValue "true"

The rule is created using the “New-TransportRule” cmdlet as per the above.

Enter your own details below to have the Powershell code to exclude your own messages from clutter below:

PowerShell code to exclude messages from clutter

Rule Name (e.g. Exclude Backup Notifications:

Subject to Exclude (e.g Backup Report):

The New-TransportRule Command Only:

The New-TransportRule Command and required PowerShell to connect to Office 365

The above example should result in the following in the Office 365 Admin Centre:

Screenshot showing rule to exclude messages from clutter

You can check if the rule worked by sending an email from an external account to your Office 365 tenant and checking the properties of the message when it has arrived:

Screenshot showing message properties from a message that has bypassed clutter

As per the screenshot above, you should be able to see a entry in the message header which says:

X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter: true

That’s all there is to it! Once you have got the messages you need, consider automatically processing them with an Outlook Macro.

I’ve also written another post on Office 365 Transport Rules, which many have found useful.