Migrating Your Outlook Authentication Today

Motivation and Objective

Transition Timeline

September 16th, 2024

Basic Authentication no longer available to access any Outlook account

According to the Modern Authentication Methods now needed to continue syncing Outlook Email in non-Microsoft email apps support doc. You need to migrate the basic authentication to modern methods like OAuth.

Here is what I’ve done and some difficulties encountered.

Please also check out the code from shinyzhu/outlook-bot-tool repo on GitHub.

The Implementation

I use the device_code_flow to authenticate and get access_token, then use the imaplib to fetch emails and smtplib to send emails out.

I DON’T use the Microsoft Graph API here. You don’t have to use it either.

And it also provides local file token cache. So you don’t need to login every time.

Example output:

Once you logged and authorized the app. The user info, access token and refresh token will be saved to a local JSON file.

(ohoutlook) outlook-bot-tool[main*] % python mailbot.py
INFO:root:No accounts found in cache
INFO:root:🔑 Device code flow initiated
To sign in, use a web browser to open the page https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the code IQA3Y48WV to authenticate.

----------------------------------------------------
Open: https://microsoft.com/devicelogin
Code: IQA3Y48WV
----------------------------------------------------

INFO:root:🔐 Token acquired from remote
====================================================================================================
Subject: New app(s) connected to your Microsoft account
From: Microsoft account team
        <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2024 21:21:03 -0700
====================================================================================================
Subject: New app(s) connected to your Microsoft account
From: Microsoft account team
        <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2024 21:26:32 -0700

Then for later calling, you don’t need to login again because the token is fetched from the cache file:

(ohoutlook) outlook-bot-tool[main*] % python mailbot.py
INFO:root:🔐 Token acquired from cache
Email sent

You can reuse the code in my repo. And just replace the authentication code. It should work fine.

The Problems

Can’t create a Microsoft Entra application

create-entra-app

Follow this to Register an application:

The ability to create applications outside of a directory has been deprecated. You may get a new directory by joining the M365 Developer Program or signing up for Azure.

Resources

Office/Exchange Doc: Authenticate an IMAP, POP or SMTP connection using OAuth
https://jwt.ms/

Last modified on September 17, 2024