Godaddy drops internal SMTP in favor of Office365 SMTP

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Some issues occur on the new setup when trying to send mail from FMS.

Quote removed at author's request.

Richard Fincher

A general comment, not specific to O365 :

Over the next few months and years, there has been and will be a further a general tightening up of email encryption, authentication and security generally on all world email systems. This means that systems which work fine now, are quite likely to stop working with little or no notice, requiring either further software updates at the SMTP sending end, further updates to the DNS of the domain name upon which the From: address is based, or possibly even requiring you to switch to a different provider. December 31st 2019 will be a milestone in particular.

Those using a Filemaker Plugin are likely to fare better than those not using a Filemaker Plugin, as you have a developer working full time on keeping your SMTP compliant with the latest standards.

Bear in mind that Microsoft, Google et al provide their SMTP service primarily for use with a desktop email client (MUA) and whilst it is sometimes possible to use it for other purposes, such as sending from a database, this non-mainstream use may attract little or no official support from the provider. They may even stop offering SMTP to end-users altogether in future. A dedicated mail-sending SMTP product would be a better bet for the long term.

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Good to know, thanks.

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And not just email. We’ve some old Citrix servers and the newest Citrix Workspace (née Receiver) for Windows will no longer work due to Citrix dropping support for various TLS ciphers and in particular TLS 1.0. Many hosting suppliers are only supporting TLS 1.2.

Interestingly the latest Mac Workspace clients still work fine, but I’m sure it is only a matter of time.

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TLS/1.2 has been mandatory in any IT connected with credit cards (due to the PCI-DSS security spec), but is currently just “Best Practice” in most of the rest of the hosting sector. (SSLv3, the precursor of TLS/1.0, has been deprecated for some years)

We are looking at continuing to provide a special SMTP server to be used by devices such as all-in-one printer/scanners, which cannot easily be upgraded to TLS/1.2, and cannot easily be replaced (for cost reasons). Whether we do, will depend on how many customers there’d be, and what they’d be prepared to pay.

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