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. -- A: When it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: When is top-posting a bad thing? () ASCII ribbon campaign. Please avoid HTML emails & proprietary /\ file formats. (Why? See e.g. https://v.gd/jrmGbS ). Thank you.
