Sage CRM 2020 R2 introduced Modern Authentication (OAuth 2.0) for use with Office 365 Exchange Integration. See the article "Understanding OAuth 2.0" 

We introduced this because of the ending of support by Microsoft for the use of Basic Authentication when connecting to Exchange Web Services and POP3.

Sage CRM has an internal e-Mail client that allows users to create, send and manage emails entirely within CRM. And it also has the Advanced E-mail Manager that can be run as a background process on the server which processes inbound emails according to predefined business rules.

Sage CRM 2021 R1 has introduced support for authentication using OAuth 2.0 for both Gmail and Exchange.

The OAuth mechanism works by issuing access tokens to an application like Sage CRM by an authorization server. That has to be with the approval of the resource owner. The Sage CRM then uses the access token to access the protected resources hosted by the resource server.

At a high level, both the Internal E-mail client and the Advanced E-mail Manager will follow the same basic authorization pattern:

• Sage CRM is registered as an application for either Google or Active Directory.
• The Sage CRM 'application' will then request that the user grants access to data in their Google/Exchange account.
• After consent is given, the Sage CRM application requests and receives credentials to access either Gmail or Exchange.
• Credentials can be updated or refreshed as necessary.

The extension of OAuth2 support within Sage CRM is a step forward in the use of credentials for authentication for API service users and supports the product’s strategic vision for rich integration capability.