Microsoft announces some changes to Outlook for users. The company plans to stop supporting basic authentication for personal Outlook accounts on September 16, the lightweight web version of Outlook will be removed on August 19, and support for Gmail accounts on Outlook.com will be discontinued on June 30. This was reported by The Verge.

Basic authentication is a method in which a user provides only his or her name and password to log in to an account.

All of these changes are part of Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative, which aims to revise the way we provide security.

Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live.com users will have to access their mailboxes through applications that use modern authentication starting September 16. Support for third-party email applications that don’t use Microsoft’s own sign-in prompt will end later this year.

Modern authentication methods involve the use of additional internal processes or tokens.

By the end of June, Microsoft will separately inform all Outlook users who use email services that will be discontinued.

As for the termination of support for Gmail, this applies only to the web version of the service. In separate applications for Windows and Mac, support for Google mail should remain.