Four years ago, we started broadcasting alerts, warning that all major email and related service providers were transitioning from old, insecure protocols such as SMTP, POP and IMAP.
We also provided examples of how you can use the APIs they provide to future-proof your solutions.
Their plans were put on hold during Covid, and that probably lulled many of us into a false sense of non-urgency. But now, these plans are back in full swing.
Microsoft has already made some further moves, like retiring basic authentication, as we highlighted in this blog post from October 2022.
Now Google is putting some pressure on:
Starting in autumn of 2024, you and your users must use OAuth with third-party apps to access Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts.
In the linked articles, Google mentions 30 September 2024 as the deadline to get away from Less Secure Apps (LSA). In practical terms, it means you cannot use basic authentication anymore; gone are the simple usernames and passwords.
In your solutions, any SMTP emailing that you have built in may stop working. But there are other functional areas that will be affected as well: any calendaring, document sharing, and any other of their services you integrate with.
If you are still using SMTP to send out email from inside FileMaker, we very strongly encourage you to prioritize the re-coding required to switch to APIs. Hopefully, our repeated alerts going back four years made it so that your plans for that are well under way. If you have no active project to get this done, then reach out to us; we have done many of these updated integrations already and can help you get this done before it becomes an emergency.
