Microsoft has recently announced that they plan to disable all basic authentication for their Microsoft 365 and outlook.com accounts, and only the Microsoft modern authentication via OAuth 2 will be available. Effective October 1st, 2022, Microsoft will begin disabling all Basic authentication for existing protocols.
You can read more about this change in this Microsoft article - Deprecation of Basic authentication in Exchange Online.
What does this mean for eM Client?
eM Client already provides OAuth 2 for Microsoft accounts, but not as a default for all setups. If you manually set up your outlook.com, Hotmail, Live or other free Microsoft account with EWS (Exchange Web Services) protocol it is likely this setup will stop working. Same goes for accounts setup via App password – even though this is also a more secure connection method, it is being deprecated as well.
To check if your Office 365 or Outlook.com account is set up with OAuth, go to Menu > Accounts and in the General tab check if you have the ‘Authentication’ section in this tab, which contains Username and Password fields.
If these are missing completely, it means the app is connecting using the OAuth token instead and your account will keep working with Microsoft Auth even after October 1st.
If you do see the Authentication section, you just need to set up your account anew.
- Click the Add account button
- Insert your email address into the Automatic setup – the automatic setup will always use the more secure authentication.
- Part of the login will be inserting your password into a web browser window, not directly in eM Client – that means the password is checked directly with Microsoft server which then issues an access token to eM Client. This is what makes this MS Auth login method more secure.
- Remove your previous account set up if it was using IMAP or EWS.
If it's POP, follow the steps in the note below.
And that is all, in most cases you might already be using the secure auth if you followed eM Client’s automatic setup, but if you are worried, it is super easy to check and re-set your account in eM Client if needed to use it as your Microsoft auth app.
Note: If you previously had your MS account set up as POP,
only remove the POP account once you have made sure that the messages are still on the server or in the IMAP/EWS account once you set it up.
eM Client allows duplicate setups, so you can
create your IMAP or Exchange account alongside the POP one and then
copy the messages from your POP account to the IMAP/EWS one. Once your messages are copied over, it is safe to remove the POP account.
What’s the difference between POP and IMAP?
Using Outlook.com with Exchange protocol
We know that some of you manually set up their free Microsoft accounts as Exchange by design, either because of the better performance of this protocol or to synchronize Contacts, Calendars and Notes, when the default combined setup of IMAP and AirSync did not work for your accounts previously. Please try this IMAP+Airsync setup again and if you experience any problems with it, reach out to us with the error details to [email protected] so we can help you resolve it.
Our team is also working on implementing GraphAPI for all Microsoft accounts, which is currently in BETA and not fully functional yet, but it will allow both modern Auth and synchronization of all your data once Microsoft finishes it.
We apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.