Hi - I'm trying to get an Office 365 Exchange account set-up with the Windows 8 Mail app.  It's giving me an error stating the following:

To sync this account, you first need to: Make your Windows user account an administrator. 

I do not want to give admin privileges to the individual user account on Windows (as the error is stating that it wants me to give admin privileges to the local Windows 8 account - not on Office 365) and I cannot find any restriction set-up in the admin console/settings on Office 365 (or in Widows 8) that would require this privilege. 

This same account (on Office 365) can connect fine via Outlook 2010 and a Windows Phone 7 mail app. 

How can I solve this?..

This behavior should be by design. I suggest you discuss in our Office 365 forum to try to find workarounds.

Hi - I have discussed in the Office 365 forum but haven't received any responses to solve the issue.

Question:  Why would this be by design?

From a security standpoint, all end-users (everyone) should only run as local users with no administrative privileges and then only to use an administrator account to perform administrative tasks. 

This is also true setting up EAS (through the built in mail app on Surface RT/PRO) to my Exchange 2007 server.  I get a messge that the logged in user must be a local administrator.  The need to be a local admin to setup EAS makes absolutely no sense. What is the status of this bug?

Found this fix for this. It happens when UAC is set to Always Notify. Turn UAC down one notch and setup works OK.

• Proposed as answer by Jesse Brandeburg Monday, February 23, 2015 6:52 PM

Found this fix for this. It happens when UAC is set to Always Notify. Turn UAC down one notch and setup works OK.

• Proposed as answer by JesseBrandeburg 16 hours 54 minutes ago

Derek,

Can you please share the UAC setting or GPO settings you used to fix this in Windows 8?  I've gone to the lowest available setting in the UI (there appears to be a lower limit that a NON-admin user can manually set UAC to and to get any other levels, you need to use GPO) and still no luck. 

Thx,

DML

This worked perfectly. Thank you so much!

Once I changed the UAC settings, I launched mail app and got a prompt I needed to enforce security settings which I accepted then everything started to work.  Hooray!

I'm really interested in which GPO setting you have to change. That's because you can't easily change the UAC settings with a slider in the GPO Editor. Do you know how this can be done?

Thanks!