Basic Authentication Deprecation in Exchange Online – What’s Next

Empower its already an extra hurdle to enable smtp, but it’ll also be impacted by the basic auth shutdown. Embedded devices like printers, network switches and cameras that use smtp for alerting will be unable to send mail by January. 

There are a million ways Microsoft could have sunset basic auth without just throwing a switch. Whitelisting IPs for basic auth would have been a pain, but at least it would have given users a way to control this. I’ve opened support tickets and had them closed (against my protest) and reached out on social media. No one seems to care about the blast radius of this decision, or have any interest in allowing paying customers to control their own tenancy.