Outlook personal email accounts will need more than just usernames and passwords Sept. 16

Just to summarize if anybody is confused by this announcement.

The modern authentication that Microsoft is talking about in the linked article is just the OAuth2 based authentication that everybody except Microsoft switched to a few years ago. For example, Yahoo email switched to OAuth2 at the end of 2020, and in order to download my Yahoo emails in MS Outlook, I had to create a temp password on my Yahoo account and grant MS Outlook permission to connect, because MS Outlook at that time did not support OAuth2, they only started supporting it very recently.

So if anyone was wondering, as long as you are not using a third party email client that is 4 or 5 years old, then this is a non issue for you, as you will keep on accessing your Outlook emails as usual. You may have to delete and re-add your Outlook email account, as the old one was most likely configured with the older basic authentication method.

Microsoft is way behind the times here and are trying to catch-up with the rest of the world, but phrasing their media statements in such a way as to portray that they are migrating to some new cutting edge technology!

Modern Authentication Methods now needed to continue syncing Outlook Email in non-Microsoft email apps

 

Thanks for the clarification @Raza0007

 

+1

 

The fun part is that Outlook email client does not support OAuth2 for 3rd party email login for Outlook, so I am forced to use Bluemail for Outlook, though I would prefer to use Outlook for Outlook.

 

The thing is that the version of Outlook included in Microsoft Office 365, the subscription based version of Outlook, does include OAuth2 support for one third party email service, namely Gmail. This is how Gmail accounts get setup in Outlook 365. For obvious reasons Microsoft does not want to add this functionality to the paid desktop version of Outlook, as they want users to switch to their subscription based plans.

But now Google is also planning to decommission the legacy authentication method this fall, and move exclusively over to OAuth2. So users will need to use the app password method to download their emails to the retail version of the Outlook desktop client included with Office 2021.

 

Thanks for the info Raza.

 

I'm not sure I fully understand what the outcome of this will be until it happens but if Outlook does not work for the email accounts we use then Office will not get renewed anymore.

 

I am guessing that people who use older email clients like Outlook 2016, 2019 or 2021 that lack OAuth2 support for third-party email services will continue to download their emails using the "app password" workaround. This is what Yahoo did in 2020, and Google also mentions it in this article.

Microsoft is also working on Office 2024 LTSC, currently in beta, which will be released this Fall. I am not sure what changes they are making to Outlook 2024, but hopefully one of the changes is native support for OAuth2 for all email services.

 

No problem here as I don't like Outlook.

 

That would be good. If not people will be forced to find alternatives.

 

Thank you Raza0007 for explanation. I have one personal Outlook account that I access via Thunderbird. I put this into my calendar. You saved a lot of time by those explanations

 

I think this was all harder than I expected it to be. If I had read the blog post that was linked in the first post of this discussion I wouldn't have had any questions where I only read the Neowin article which gave me more questions than answers. From the blog post I see that the current version of Outlook won't be a problem and I am no longer concerned with this subject.

 

Anyone already tried this with Thunderbird?
I set the IMAP server to OAuth2, but the SMTP server settings don't have an option for OAuth2 at all.. I'm on 115.13.0
And OAuth2 on the IMAP server doesn't seem to work, as I'm getting error messages that it doesn't support the authentication method when checking for new e-mail.

 

Please explain what exactly this means for those of us who already use the desktop version of Outlook (from Microsoft Office 365) to access our Gmail account. I do have a MSN email account, but I forward those emails directly to my Gmail email address and then use Outlook 365 to access my Gmail. (I don't use my MSN account for anything. It is mostly spam/junk emails right now.)

Thank you.

P.S. Call me old fashioned, but I am not a fan of web-based email. I still want and use desktop Outlook and probably always will (until it no longer works with my Gmail email account.)

 

As long as you are using the latest version of Outlook desktop, you have to do nothing. The newer version of Outlook desktop already supports OAuth2. You may need to delete and re-add your account in case you setup your Gmail account a long time ago, and it got setup with the legacy basic authentication.

They are just terminating the basic authentication support by Sept 16 2024.

 

Just delete and re-add you account. Thunderbird should automatically download the correct settings, you do not need to enter anything manually.

 

I was still using an IMAP server with outlook.com domain. MS now recommends office365.com, that works fine with OAuth2 here. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...look-com-d088b986-291d-42b8-9564-9c414e2aa040)
Changing SMTP to suddenly made the OAuth option appear. MS still recommend outlook.com domain for SMTP, but that gave me timeouts. Office365.com works fine.

 

Since two weeks had to reconfigure my ***@live.com.my on Evolution Mail, running Debian :
IMAP: imap-mail.outlook.com / 993 / dedicated TLS port / OAuth2
SMTP : smtp-mail.outlook.com / 587 / STARTTLS after connect / OAuth2

Mailnag notifier still work under IMAP at outlook.office365.com, but for how long time? Maybe on 16 sept!!!!

 

I changed setting in Thunderbird to the ones posted by Rules then restarted the e-mail client. After Thunderbird startup I had to type go through similar login page as I saw in web browser and that's it. Everything works well.

Edit August 7th: Smtp from Microsoft and Rules gave me timeouts, so I changed to
outlook.office365.com as Boerenkool advised. Mail sent successfully