Preparing for the Deprecation of Basic Authentication with the Perceptive Content Email Agent

[Logan_Tackett]

This blog is a collaborative effort between Malcolm Saltzman, Logan Tackett, and Zennith Boerger.

As you may be aware, both Google and Microsoft have begun taking steps in order to increase security across a variety of their platforms and are slowly deprecating support for various outdated standards in favor of newer stronger standards that can avoid more advanced attacks.  

Starting October 1st, 2022, Microsoft will be disabling support for Basic Authentication for Outlook, EWS, RPS, POP, IMAP, and EAS protocols in Exchange Online. Although not directly affecting Perceptive Content, SMTP Auth will also be disabled if it is not already implemented by that date. Microsoft's full newsletter regarding these changes can be viewed here.  

Google has not officially announced a new date for their full-scale deprecation of Basic Authentication for Google Workspace and Google Cloud Identity customers since they first delayed it back in March of 2020. However, as of May 30, 2022, Google has stopped supporting “Less secure apps”, it is likely that a new timeline will be released soon, so it will be good to be prepared. 

If you or your organization is currently using a form of Basic Authentication in conjunction with the Perceptive Content Email Agent, not to worry, Microsoft and Google will still be supporting all forms of Modern Authentication, which mainly includes OAuth 2.0 token-based authentication. These standards, specifically EWSCS and ESWROPC, are already fully supported by the Perceptive Content Email Agent and should be an easy change after updating your organization's authentication standards. Although it is possible to simply update your authentication standards and make the applicable changes to the Perceptive Content configuration settings, we do recommend updating your version of the Email Agent to version 1.4.1, if possible, especially if your organization relies on Google products. 

Updating to Perceptive Client Email Agent 1.4.1 

For a smooth transitional process, the Perceptive Content Email Agent 1.4.1 is now available for download on the Perceptive Software Downloads page of our Community. Look for the “Perceptive Content - Perceptive Content Email Agent 1.4.1”.  This update has only two changes, but the only one we are interested in here is the support for an interactive method of acquiring OAuth tokens to be used for accessing Gmail accounts. The acquisition of tokens used with OAuth authentication is handled by a small user interface that is packaged with the installation. If you’d like more information on this patch, please refer to the Email Agent 1.4.1 Patch Notes as well as the Email Agent 1.4.1 Installation Guide.

Changing Authentication Method in Perceptive Content Email Agent 

After creating any necessary changes to your email server’s authentication standards and installing the new version of Perceptive Content Email Agent, you will then need to ensure that the configuration settings within the Client are up to date and match your new standards. Although it is recommended that you review all server-related configuration settings to ensure that they are all up to date, it is most important to update any configuration options that directly reference the authentication protocol such as server.incoming.protocol and server.outgoing.protocol. The full list of these options and how they are expected to be configured can be found starting on page 10 of the installation guide. 

It is also important to ensure that you are following the specific configuration settings for your chosen authentication method as Perceptive Content may require different fields to be used depending on the protocol. 

Although we understand that it can be frustrating to need to make in-depth upgrades to your security, it is necessary  to keep you and your data safe. We hope that this guide will help ease any causes for concern regarding this upcoming change by Microsoft and the eventual rollout of Google’s ending of support as well as give you plenty of notice to get these modifications in motion before the official changes release. 

If you are still having issues regarding either the installation of the new Email Agent or updating the agent to include Modern Authentication, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Perceptive Content community forum