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.
Requests access for email access.

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.

Exchange online or Office 365 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.