Outlook no longer accepts classic authentication methods to sync

Delta chat accounts using outlook.com as a backend can no longer be used
because the desktop and android apps can no longer sign in:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/modern-authentication-methods-now-needed-to-continue-syncing-outlook-email-in-non-microsoft-email-apps-c5d65390-9676-4763-b41f-d7986499a90d

Modern Authentication Methods now needed to continue syncing Outlook Email in non-Microsoft email apps

  • June 11, 2024: Basic authentication end of support timeline communicated
  • End of June 2024: Outlook account actively using Basic Authentication contacted via email
  • September 16th, 2024: Basic authentication no longer available to access any Outlook account

That basically means we’re now locked out of those accounts.

How is Delta.Chat going to handle this ?
Switching to nine.testrun.org is a possibility but a lot of contacts
are still trying to communicate via the outlook address and right now
they might think they are being ghosted.

There is a related previous discussion at Office/Outlook 365 will no longer support Basic Auth by Oct 1st, 2022 · Issue #3196 · deltachat/deltachat-core-rust · GitHub

Delta Chat will likely drop XOAUTH2 support completely in the future. Gmail is pushing applications to use Gmail API instead of IMAP: OAuth 2.0 Mechanism  |  Gmail  |  Google for Developers The other provider Delta Chat supports OAuth 2 for is Yandex, but it is not usable because it asks users to open the browser and solve captcha when they hit some rate limits.

Problem with OAuth 2 is that it requires pre-registering Delta Chat with each email provider and hardcording OAuth 2 authentication URLs into the application. This option is limited to large providers and they can always decide to change requirements and unregister the client.

There are two approaches that try to fix OAuth 2:

3 Likes

which has happened more than once with Gmail in the past

1 Like

There is another interesting consequence of outlook.com no longer working:
I can no longer control bots used with that account, which results in my outlook.com
receiving thousands of e-mails which I can no longer see. (I can of course go to outlook.com and delete them, but I cannot stop it from happening and so I keep running out of space)