Scan-to-Email

The Issue

Security Defaults: Microsoft introduced Security Defaults to improve the overall security of tenant environments by enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other security practices by default. This helps protect against common identity-related attacks, such as password spraying and replay attacks.

Basic Authentication: Basic Auth is an older authentication protocol that requires sending credentials (username and password) with each request, making it more susceptible to interception and attacks. Microsoft has deprecated Basic Auth in favour of Modern Authentication (OAuth 2.0), which provides more secure methods, including MFA.

How Purple, and Mandrill, Can Help

Mandrill is a paid Mailchimp add-on, and allows clients to send one-to-one transactional emails triggered by user actions, like requesting a password or placing an order. Mandrill works as a workaround for several reasons, primarily because it bypasses the need for Basic Authentication (Basic Auth) and leverages more secure and modern email-sending protocols.

We use this alternative method that allows the sending of secure, authenticated emails from the likes of printers and scanners that use authenticated SMTP, which Microsoft 365 no longer supports out of the box.

Using Mandrill has the advantage that there is no actual mailbox attached to the account, so there is less incentive to be hacked. The account uses a random and unique password that nobody has any need to use, which means it’s highly unlikely to be exposed through phishing or other scams.

The Purple team will then go on to ensure that the Mandrill sending system is configured and correctly authorised to send legitimate emails from your company’s domain name, using DNS, to ensure good deliverability.