Support for modern authentication in Outlook-IMAP, Exchange and Google

Microsoft announced that basic authentication will be discontinued in their products starting October 2020. Google had a similar announcement in the same year. This applies to both Office 365, Exchange and Google, GSuite accounts.

To cater to this, v3.2 build 1049 introduces full support for Microsoft based second factor authentication (OAuth) and Google’s second factor authentication OAuth for cloud-based or hybrid environments.

This new build now includes support for modern authentication for these types of mail servers:

IMAP to Outlook/Live
Exchange (non on-prem deployments)
Google OAuth

Shown below is an example of a popup using Microsoft authentication. The program currently triggers this popup only if the following are met:

Basic authentication fails to work (tries basic by default always)
Password is incorrect

Need to move away from Basic Auth? If you are trying to move away from Basic authentication or are trying to force the program to not use it, we suggest you enter the wrong password and if you try to test the connection after that, it should popup the ability to use the second factor auth. Note that you need to be on v3.2 build 1048 for this to work properly. That will work provided your admin has configured support for this new form of authentication.

If you received the error the Autodiscover service couldn’t be located, please check this KB article for possible ways to mitigate this.

The screenshot below captures what this popup will look like…

Initial popup asking for credentials in a browser popup.

If you received any errors at this stage, it likely means that the admin has not given this program permissions to access the specific scopes that are being requested (eg. EWS.AccessAsUser.All for Exchange/O365). Please contact or check online on how to change permissions to do so.

Once you have proceeded through the prompts you can click on Connect and Download to save the credentials. If you want to delete the account or the credentials you can click on the delete account button in the main program window.

For Exchange online or Office 365 accounts, we recommend going with the following default server settings.

There is a new checkbox in the settings above On-prem ONLY and we recommend leaving that unchecked. If you check that box, then there will be no popup requesting credentials.

That’s it!

Again, we encourage our users to contact support@gearmage.com if you have any feedback on authentication issues you may be having.

New Filter Features in PRO Server v3.2 build 978

Mail Attachment Downloader PRO and PRO Server editions offers email filters to configure the program to process emails and attachments in different ways.

This gives an introduction to Global Filters and explores some of the new features introduced in PRO Server v3.2 build 978.

Overview

For an overview of how to save emails and attachments in specific folders please refer to this post before reading through this one.

What are global filters?

The global filters are a set of rules you can create in the Global Filters tab as shown below. This is only available in the PRO and PRO Server editions of the product.

Global filters apply to all configured accounts in the program (under the Account dropdown).

Note that to download from multiple accounts, you must pick ‘multiple@multiple’ from the Account dropdown. Otherwise the download will only run for a single account.

When is a global filter run?

For each attachment, a global filter is run to see if any filters you have specified within match that particular attachment.

How to make a Global Filter apply to a single account?

By default, global filters run for all selected accounts (when you select multiple@multiple from the Account dropdown in the main window).

You can make a global filter apply only to a specific account by editing the rule and then clicking Add -> Filters -> Account filter as shown below.

This will make that rule run only for that account. Once you have clicked Save, this will also show up in the main list.

Moving rules

Each rule is run for every attachment from top down until a matching rule is found. The ordering of the rules in the global filters tab is important.

Once a matching rule is found for a specific attachment or body, then NO other rule is run for that attachment or body. If the email has other attachments, then all rules are checked again.

To move one or more rules, just drag and drop the rule or rules in the Global Filters tab.

Catch all rule, send auto-response

If you want certain attachments to be processed, then define global rules for those. But what if none of them matched?

Since filters in the global filters are run top down and ordering matters, you can now define a catch all rule towards the end of the global rule filters list.

This last rule will run when none of the rules above it have resulted in a successful match or download.

That way, you can, for example, send an email to the sender indicating that their email did not contain the requested attachment or data.

Enable / Disable specific rules

You can now enable or disable specific global filter rules. Just go to the global filter tab and then right click on one or more rules and then Enable or Disable them. Disabled rules will never run.

Setting download dates

The program starts downloading messages from an account from the start of time if it had never run a download from that account before. This is true even when Messages since last download was checked in the Search or Global Filters tab.

If you want to change this behavior, you can set a Start Date above and also switch to Messages since last download in the Global filters tab.

What this does is that for each account selected in the Account dropdown (or multiple accounts when using multiple@multiple selection), the program will only download messages from that start date onwards and will only check for new messages that have not been downloaded or processed by the program.

Contact us

v3.1 PRO packs many new features

Extract emails and attachments, save to database, save email as PDF and more

We have introduced many new compelling features with the Mail Attachment Downloader PRO v3.1 release. Here is a quick overview of those features. We will have more detailed information about how to use these features in upcoming blog posts so stay tuned.

Before we begin, a quick note about the key differences between PRO Server and PRO licenses:

Our PRO Server versions let you perform automated tasks 24×7 on an unlimited number of email accounts and can run on Windows Server (and Windows Client).
Our PRO and PRO Limited versions cannot run on Windows Server and requires a user to be logged in when processing email attachments.

With v3.1 we have started to introduce more powerful email automation and processing features. Some of these are detailed below:

Convert email attachments after download to PDF
Encrypt or decrypt PDF email attachments automatically
Automatically print email attachments
Upload email attachments to Sharepoint online or on-prem

If you get the PRO Server, you get some even more powerful features and support for unlimited email accounts.

Automatically unzip email attachments and run rules (for example, unzip PDF file, then decrypt PDF and print it automatically!)
Automatically save email headers and optionally attachments to a database (which fields you save and how you want it saved are completely customizable).
Convert email attachments (text, html, word, excel, powerpoint and more) to over 50+ formats (bmp, csv, dif, doc, docm, docx, dot, dotm, dotx, emf, epub, excel, flatopc, flatopcmacroenabled, flatopctemplate, flatopctemplatemacroenabled, html, htmlfixed, jpeg, mhtml, mobixml, odp, ods, odt, openxps, ott, pdf, pdfnotes, png, potm, potx, pps, ppsm, ppsx, ppt, pptm, pptx, ps, rtf, spreadsheetml, svg, swf, tabdelimited, tex, text, tiff, tiffnotes, wordml, xamlfixed, xamlflow, xamlflowpack, xlam, xlsb, xlsm, xlsx, xltm, xltx, xml, xps)

For a full feature breakdown by PRO license type go here.

Have questions about these features or found an issue? Contact us at support@gearmage.com (this is the fastest way to receive support).

As always, we enjoy hearing your feature requests, send them to features@gearmage.com.

Category: Announcements