The IT Nerd

Yesterday I posted that there seemed to be some hope in terms of Rogers finally fixing their email issues that have plagued users of Rogers email offering for months. I also asked for some help in validating this and as usual, the readers of this blog responded. And that response has helped me to construct this update so you have all the information that you need to use Rogers email offering if you wish to do so. Which I wouldn’t if I were you. More on that later.

First of all, Rogers or more accurately Yahoo! who Rogers gets its email services from have apparently implemented OAuth which is defined as follows:

OAuth (short for “Open Authorization“) is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. This mechanism is used by companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter to permit users to share information about their accounts with third-party applications or websites.

I suspect that Yahoo! has implemented OAuth because their security when it comes to their email offering has been at best suspect for years as evidenced by numerous people getting their Yahoo! email accounts hacked over the years along with the company suffering some really bad security breaches. Thus going this route mitigates a lot of those issues. Maybe. That’s the cynical side of me saying that. But to be fair, Gmail has used OAuth for years and they don’t have the sort of security issues that Yahoo! has. Thus perhaps Yahoo! will get the same result.

Now the catch with OAuth is that your email client needs to have support for it. Microsoft who makes the Outlook email client appears to be rolling out support for OAuth on Yahoo! as per this document. However this support hasn’t appeared on Microsoft Office 365 product as of yet (Unless you want to run beta software, which I would not recommend). It however has started to appear on Microsoft’s one time purchase version of Office (where you pay once and you get the software forever unlike Office 365) as I have had reports of Rogers email all of a sudden starting to work or needing to be reconfigured before it starts working again, along with the fact that I have personally witnessed this working. I have also confirmed that the Mozilla email client Thunderbird seems to work as well.

So in short, to make this work you need the following:

• Your rogers email address which ends in @Rogers.com
• The password that you use for either the Rogers Member Center or Rogers Webmail
• Your Outlook email client updated to the latest version possible of Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird

I will keep you updated as to developments on this front as I know that this is a top of mind issue for many Rogers customers.

Now, here’s why I wouldn’t bother doing any of this and instead encourage you to abandon Rogers email offering and use something else. The majority of my reasons can be found in this article. But my main reason for not recommending that you use Rogers email offering is that Rogers has really dropped the ball here. They have not communicated with their clients who pay them money for this. Which makes this issue, as bad is it is, much worse. Clearly Rogers hasn’t learned the lessons from last year’s massive outage about how to communicate to customers. Thus as a result, I would not trust them with your email.

This entry was posted on August 1, 2023 at 9:51 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.