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Azure AD MFA

Iron Contributor

my CIO was speaking to a colluege and was told that there is a way to have MFA but not use App Passwords?

ITs been my understanding that APP Passwords are a must with MFA as the Native mail clients on mobile devices are

not capable of supporting it?

7 Replies
It’s subjective about ‘have’ to have but technically you’ll be missing local contacts etc. on your iOS devices and have to use outlook. Until outlook is capable to tap on and two way sync with phone contacts it won’t be possible or if iOS supports it.
It’s subjective about have to have but technically you’ll be missing local contacts etc. on your iOS devices and have to use outlook. Until outlook is capable to tap on and two way sync with phone contacts it won’t be possible or if iOS supports it.

The thing with app passwords is that they are simply a workaround, they bypass MFA and should generally be avoided. Every Microsoft application nowadays supports modern authentication, and thus MFA, and so do some of the third-party apps (Mail client on recent versions of iOS). There might still be the occasional app that doesn't support it, but the decision here is between using that app or increased security overall.

When did iOS mail start supporting MFA? I missed that memo

Don't recall the exact version as I'm an Android user, I believe it's iOS 11 or so.

Nice. Didn’t realize that :flushed_face:. So does android? If not I assume android can use outlook contacts as phone contacts or no?
we had this same issue in my organization. We ended up having to switch our authentication in our tenant to modern authentication, then we enabled MFA. User utilizing their native mail clients had to delete their current accounts then re configure the client. Seemed to work for most people. The only people it didn't work for was a handful android users. The real fix was to recommend the user to utilize the microsoft outlook mobile app.