support for Office365?

[Sam Kuper]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 10:16:07AM -0400, Spackman, Chris wrote:
> On 2020/09/27 at 12:05pm, ed neville wrote:
>> Just out of interest, does anyone know /why/ organisations, in their
>> rampant desire to outsource to the cloud disable IMAP and SMTP
>> protocols whilst doing that? Is something to be feared? Surely MS
>> cares only that people pay the monthly rent on Office 365?
> 
> [..] I can't speak to the actual security benefits, but I suspect that
> most IT people at the organization assume or expect that everyone uses
> Outlook, so why would they need IMAP?

This.

It is the sort of view that I have encountered in several organisations
abandoning sensible email systems in favour of proprietary mainframe
spyware.

Many of today's IT staff/managers aren't sysadmins in the traditional
sense (often don't even have OS-level access to the servers their
organisations software runs on, let alone hardware-level), don't know
how email systems work under the hood, and are heavily targeted with
marketing from companies like Microsoft telling them that if they buy a
service like Outlook365 (or whatever it's called these days), then it
will handle everything email-related for them and their users and they
will never have to understand or be accountable for anything ever again.

All too often their response is, "Great!"


> It is possible that [Microsoft] also "highly recommend" turning off
> "legacy protocols".

Again, this.  They just go through the process and select the
"recommended" settings.  If they think about it at all, it doesn't go
very deep: they conclude (wrongly, of course) that forcing users off
IMAP is an "upgrade" that the users will thank them for :(

In short, if your organisation moves its email to something like O365 or
Gmail, then your organisation is managed by thoughtless authoritarians,
and if you stay there after a change like that then you are only
enabling them.  If reasoning with them fails, then cut your losses and
run.

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