Repeated Outlook 2007 Password Prompts with Hosted Exchange Account

A couple of weeks ago, I moved the remainder of my sites from 1&1 to Servage (that link will get you an extra 75 GB of storage) for my personal Web hosting, and among them was my wife’s domain. This domain is connected to a hosted Exchange account (4smartphone), and part of the move was setting up a the autodiscovery domain so Outlook can self-configure. After the DNS changes were made, something strange started happening with Outlook on both my wife’s desktop and netbook: it would repeatedly prompt for the password. No password changes were made, and strangely enough, she could send and receive email even though every few minutes it would prompt her for the password. 4smartphone tech support wasn’t very helpful; they claimed it was an Outlook problem. After some sleuthing around, convinced that it was related to the DNS changes I made, I realized my mistake: I had created the autodiscover CNAME entry pointing at the wrong server name (EXCH016 instead of EXCH015). After updating the DNS record, within a few hours the problem was fixed – no more repeated password prompts in Outlook. So if you happen to have the same sort of problem, double-check your DNS records…