In a recent blog, we mentioned the progress we're making in updating our products to support OAuth 2.0.

For those unfamiliar with this issue, there has been a slow deprecation of Office365 and Gmail services using Basic Authentication, which has impacted the use of many of our products. This has forced us to accelerate the OAuth upgrades of all our products, specifically ones with emailing features like our MailMerge products, Qsales, Tables, Opt-in Manager, Knowtifier, QuickTasks, Dash, Alerts, and many others.

This has required the pooled resources of all our developers over the last few weeks, but thankfully we're near completion.

OAuth 2.0, stands for “Open Authorization”, and is a standard designed to allow a website or application to access resources hosted by other web apps on behalf of a user. It replaced OAuth 1.0 in 2012 and is now the de facto industry standard for online authorization. OAuth 2.0 provides consented access and restricts actions of what the client app can perform on resources on behalf of the user, without ever sharing the user's credentials. Basic Authentication includes a few fields where users are asked to enter their mail server, email credentials, and security level, and that's it.

If you own or subscribe to one of the affected products, our update policy will be as follows:

• Perpetual license products: fix all supported versions of these products without charge. Anyone with a current perpetual license of one of our products will be notified early next week of the free updates when they're all completed. Those using unsupported products like Designer v6 or Dash v9 will need to purchase the current version of each product or switch to an email provider that supports Basic Authentication. 
• Subscription products: Anyone on a subscription product like Opt-in Manager, HHC Classic, Knowtifier, Tables, or Qsales, to name a few, will also get free updates. 

For those subscribing to our Linktivity services, the OAuth updates were applied to our servers successfully to those last month.