The IT Nerd

I wanted to provide an update on this post in which I said that there was hope in terms of a remedy to Rogers long standing email issues that have been ongoing since March of this year. And I will say up front, some of you may not like this update.

The people who will like this update are the ones that are running Office 365. According to this document on the Microsoft website, the version of Microsoft Office 365 that supports Yahoo’s implementation of OAuth has fully rolled out. And I can confirm that if you have Office 365 and you have fully updated to the latest version, you can again add a Rogers email account to Outlook. If you need steps to do that, here’s what I have been doing for my many clients who have been affected by this issue:

1. Update Microsoft Office (save your work before doing this): 

• Go to File – Click on Office account on the left side: 

• Click on Update Options and choose Update Now:

• Follow the on screen instructions.

2. Go to File- Click on Add Account:

• A box should pop up where you can enter your Rogers email address. Once you do that another box should appear: 

• Enter the password that you use for Rogers webmail. Then follow the prompts that appear after that. 

This method has worked for every single one of my clients who is running Office 365. At this point you’re likely wondering why I keep saying “Office 365” when I talk about this method. I am saying this because this support for Yahoo’s implementation of OAuth appears to not exist in what Microsoft terms as “Consumer SKUs such as Office Personal and Office Home.” Meaning that if you decided to pay once for Microsoft Office rather than use Office 365 and pay monthly or yearly for it, you’re still out of luck and you’re still forced to get your email via webmail. I have confirmed that this doesn’t work with clients who have these versions of Microsoft Office. The only workaround for this appears to be to switch to Office 365. That’s an option that I simply can’t recommend to anyone who’s already paid for Microsoft Office.

Now it would be easy to light Microsoft up like a Christmas tree in a bonfire over this lack of support for non Office 365 users. And yeah, they likely should be bringing this support for OAuth to other versions of Microsoft Office. But Microsoft wouldn’t be in this situation if Rogers and Yahoo didn’t have an incident that has been ongoing since March of this year that made this an issue for Microsoft. So what I would say to both Rogers and Yahoo is that they need to both take some leadership on this and do whatever they need to do get Microsoft to roll this out so that ALL Microsoft Office users can put this issue to bed. Either that, or both Rogers and Yahoo need to fix the app specific password issue (or stop using app specific passwords altogether) so that Rogers users can use the email client of their choice with Rogers email. Because despite what Rogers tech support says, webmail is not an acceptable replacement for something like Outlook.

Of course instead of waiting for Rogers and Yahoo to fix this, you can take the option that I’ve been recommending for a while now. Which is to abandon Rogers email offering and use something else. The majority of my reasons can be found in this article. Rogers and Yahoo aren’t communicating to users about this issue. Nor do they have a resolution to this issue that works for their entire user base. Thus You cannot depend on both companies to save you from this if you’re affected by this. Which tells you all you need to know about both companies.

I will continue to monitor this and provide further updates as they come. Because if Rogers and Yahoo isn’t going to keep you updated, someone has to. And that appears to be yours truly. Which also tells you all you need to know about both companies.

This entry was posted on August 23, 2023 at 3:15 pm 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.