[MlMt] Office365 not working anymore

[Alex Abdo]

Hi all,

I’m writing to see if anyone has advice for how to troubleshoot Mailmate’s compatibility with Office365.

Up until a few months ago, Mailmate worked just fine for me (great, even!) with my work’s Exchange-based email server. Mailmate would pull up my university’s credentialing website, and it would retrieve what I assume is an OAuth credential (but I don’t fully understand the terminology here).

Recently, however, it stopped working, and I haven’t been able to get it up and running again. I spoke with our IT department, and they explained that they had recently moved from an “on premises” version of Office365 to a cloud-based version, and that they made other changes in response to attacks on the university’s email accounts. The upshot, they said, is that OAuth is no longer enough for mail clients to connect to our mail servers, and that mail clients need to support multi-factor authentication “directly in the client.”

I confess that I don’t really understand what it means for an email client to support MFA “directly in the client.”

I do know that when I use the Apple Mail client, it works fine by authenticating me in the same way that Mailmate does (by opening up a browser window to have me log in to a university site). Beyond that, though, Apple Mail doesn’t seem to be doing anything different, and there’s nothing that is obviously “directly in the client.”

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Alex