The prospect of Microsofts upcoming deprecation of basic authentication has lead to a bunch of questions around what impact it will have for people using database mail. I thought I’d take a moment to record my understanding in the hope it saves some people out there some stress.

Database Mail should not be effected by this change. It uses SMTP authentication which Microsoft has explicitly stated will not be turned off.

Microsofts exact wording is “Please note this change does not affect SMTP AUTH – we will continue supporting Basic Authentication for the time being.  There is a huge number of devices and appliances that use SMTP for sending mail, and so we’re not including SMTP in this change – though we are working on ways to further secure SMTP AUTH and we’ll share more on that in due course.” which is pretty clear. The confusion I think comes from people who work with databases having no idea how to differentiate what is SMTP auth(Using basic authentication) and what is Basic Authentication.

Another thing to be aware of is that some of this work has already happened and not all of it will happen all at once on 1st October. By default basic authentication is not available in new tenancies and SMTP authentication is disabled. For existing tenancies basic authentication has been disabled if it is not detected as in use, and finally the change is slated to happen “from October 1st”. What that means is that October 1st is not necessarily a drop dead date and things might continue to operate after that depending how far down the change list you are. This is an important distinction for people planning to check that everything is working on October 1st-2nd(A weekend) to judge whether they have covered all the bases. Unfortunately that will not work as a strategy, you should have everything sorted by October 1st, but changes may not hit your tenancy until later in the month.