New connection protocolls in 2023 for ms-office emails, no more imap access to mailbox?

Question

Hallo all,

My initial question is how to handle reading mails in 2023 from ms-office mailboxes. I have a non-interactive script that used IMAP to login with several ms-office accounts across multiple azure ADs.

I found a similar question: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/872062/how-to-authenticate-a-backend-java-imap-applicatio-1.html

However i absolutely don't want the user to make an interactive login.
I have the password for each account so maybe i can still use oatuh, otherwise i might need ms-graph? I am quite new to this so i don't know where to start to upgrade my application and read how to get there since there are several concepts for modern authentication and i don't know where to start.

Here are the keys to my script:

• i know username & password for several ms-mailbox-accounts and could refresh the sessions but i can't make an interactive login-mask. The script is silently running server process
• i use TLS+IMAP to read those mailboxes, which needs to be replaced with something new by january according to https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-deprecation-in-exchange-online-september/ba-p/3609437
• the mailboxes belong to other / several Azure ADs i personally don't belong to. My script is running on a dedicated self-hosted ssh-server and checks for new emails on each mailbox

Can someone tell me what steps i would need to do to get this working? A general step-by-step explanation or code examples in c#,go,java or whatever are much welcome!

Answer 1

My initial question is how to handle reading mails in 2023 from ms-office mailboxes. I have a non-interactive script that used IMAP to login with several ms-office accounts across multiple azure ADs.

You can use the Graph API https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/message?view=graph-rest-1.0 and for authentication use the client credentials flow https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/msal-authentication-flows which is what you use for non-interactive apps.

Can someone tell me what steps i would need to do to get this working? A general step-by-step explanation or code examples in c#,go,java or whatever are much welcome!

There are good tutorials for the graph at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/tutorials in a number of languages that give you the step by step and code samples