At the TEC 2023 conference in Atlanta, Greg Taylor (Microsoft) analyzed the four-year project he led to remove basic authentication from Exchange Online. Microsoft will reuse the methods and tools developed for this project when it removes other features from Microsoft 365.
Now that they've disabled basic authentication for email connection protocols, Microsoft is doing the same for the Autodiscover service. This makes sense. There's no point in allowing basic authentication for Autodiscover when clients can't use basic authentication to connect. Microsoft will therefore turn off basic authentication for Autodiscover as it removes basic authentication for protocols like POP3, EAS, IMAP4, EWS, and MAPI.
The great remove basic authentication from Exchange Online project is rapidly approaching the October 1 date when Microsoft will start removing support for basic authentication for seven email connectivity protocols. We've known about this date for well over a year, but some organizations need a little extra time to be ready. Microsoft is offering a one-time three-month extension to January 1, 2023. After that, they're going to proceed with the final termination.
We all know to turn on MFA but sometimes we need to share our stories to get corporate buy-in to do it. In this Fun Friday post, Mike Weaver, Chris Cahill and Bryan Patton get real on what happens when MFA isn’t enabled.
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Many PowerShell scripts use the Send-MailMessage cmdlet to send mail. That's fine, but if you want to remove basic authentication to improve tenant security, you need to stop using Send-MailMessage. One solution is to move to use the Graph API SendMail call. This works fine, but it creates some new security issues that need to be thought through. In this article, we explain how to use the Graph to send email and some of those security considerations to ponder.
