M365 Changelog: Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – April 2020 Update

MC208814 – In response to the unprecedented situation we are in and knowing that priorities have changed for many of our customers we have decided to postpone retiring Basic Authentication in Exchange Online (MC204828) for those tenants still actively using it until the second half of 2021. We will provide a more precise date when we have a better understanding of the impact of the situation.

How does this affect me?

We will continue to disable Basic Authentication for newly created tenants by default and begin to disable Basic Authentication in tenants that have no recorded usage starting October 2020. And of course you can start blocking legacy authentication today, you don’t need us to do anything if you want to get started (and you should).

We will also continue to complete the roll-out of OAuth support for POP, IMAP, SMTP AUTH and Remote PowerShell and continue to improve our reporting capabilities. We will publish more details on these as we make progress.

What do I need to do to prepare?

This change allows you more time to update clients, applications and services that are using Basic Authentication to use Modern Authentication.Blog