GEEK FREE
By Joe Callison
5 August, 2024
Email Login Requirements are Changing
Email logins using a username and password, known as basic authentication, have become a growing security problem because of data breaches and are about to get more complicated because of changing email security requirements. To understand this better, let’s review some definitions. An email provider is a company that provides the service of storing, receiving and sending your email messages. This might be Apple, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo or even an internet service provider. An email client is a software product that you use to display, compose, and organize email on your devices. It could be a product from the email provider you use, but does not have to be. It could be Apple Mail, Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Thunderbird or many others. You can use several different ones at the same time if you like. In the past, you could generally use any email client you wanted, but email providers are moving away from basic authentication using a username and password to modern authentication using tokens generated by the open-source app OAuth 2.0, which stands for open authorization. The email client must support OAuth 2.0 to be used by most email providers eventually. Microsoft is ending basic authentication for the current Outlook email client versions in September. Older versions of Outlook or Outlook Express have already been requiring work-around methods to use certain email providers for the last couple of years. The Yahoo email service provided for AT&T companies requires using a special password provided by Yahoo to be used in place of your normal password in the old Outlook apps. OAuth 2.0 has provision for this type of workaround for legacy email clients using basic authentication, but email providers may not allow using it on their service. The transition to modern authentication may be a little bumpy for some users. Articles like the one in this link should help:
