Please review and change settings of your email applications

Due to a specification change by Microsoft, users using email applications need to change app settings. Specifically, Basic Authentication support (authentication using only ID and password) will be terminated, and Exchange connection or OAuth 2.0 authentication will be required to connect to Exchange Online. Please refer to the following information, review the current account settings of your apps, and promptly reconfigure them. To avoid an impact of Microsoft’s measures, we recommend you finish this process before December 31st, 2021.

Please refer to “Removal of Basic Authentication” for the details.

Overview
As part of Microsoft’s security enhancement, they will remove Basic Authentication support from Exchange Online soon, and mandate Modern Authentication (which supports the latest authentication technology such as Multi-Factor Authentication). We had been guiding the use of IMAP/POP/SMTP for mail applications, and these methods usually use Basic Authentication. After the removal of Basic Authentication support from Exchange Online, these applications cannot connect to Exchange Online. Exchange connection and OAuth 2.0 support Modern Authentication.

Microsoft recently announced that the removal date of Basic Authentication would be October 1st, 2022. They also announced that they would temporarily suspend Basic Authentication at randomly selected organizations for a few days from the beginning of 2022 as a reminder. The measure will disrupt the connection with Basic Authentication temporarily. Therefore, all users of mail applications need to review and change of their settings early.

This removal doesn’t affect webmail.