In December the office copier stops emailing scans, and nothing will tell you why

Somewhere in your building there is a machine that has been quietly emailing on your behalf for years. Usually it is the copier, sending scans to the office inbox. Some week in December, unless somebody has looked at it first, it will stop. The panel will not show an error worth reading. The scans will simply not arrive, and the first anyone hears of it will be a colleague asking where the signed contract went.

This is not a fault. It is a switch-off Microsoft has been trying to make for years, and the end of December 2026 is when it lands.

The password in the copier

When that copier was installed, an engineer typed a mailbox name and password into its settings. That is how it sends: it signs in to Microsoft 365 the way a person did in 2015, with a password and nothing else, using a protocol called SMTP AUTH.

Microsoft has spent a decade removing password-only sign-in from everything, for the unglamorous reason that a password with no second factor is the thing criminals actually use. People got multi-factor prompts years ago. The machines got left until last, because machines cannot read a code off a phone. SMTP AUTH is the final door, and Microsoft announced in January that it closes at the end of December 2026.

The reason this is worth a post rather than a line in a newsletter is the shape of the failure. A person locked out of email knows within a minute. A copier locked out of email tells nobody. So does the accounts package that emails your invoices, and the website contact form, and the backup job that mails a nightly "all fine".

A deadline that has moved twice, which is exactly the trap

If you have a vague memory of dealing with this already, that memory is probably real. The switch-off was first set for September 2025. Then it became a phased block through the spring of 2026. Both were abandoned after customers pushed back, and plenty of firms who read the first announcement have filed the whole subject under done.

The honest reading of that timeline cuts both ways. December is not a cliff edge, because an administrator can turn the block back off and buy you time. But treating that as the plan means your copier fails during a working week, someone scrambles, the block gets reversed in a hurry, and the same firm has the same scramble again in 2027 with no override available. Microsoft has blinked twice. The third date will be the real one, and the firms that suffer will be the ones that read the blinking as a reprieve.

Better to spend one afternoon this autumn and let December pass unnoticed.

The afternoon's work

The job is an inventory before it is a technical fix, and the inventory question is one anyone can ask: what sends email as this business that is not a human being?

01Walk the building and list everything that emails but is not a person: copiers and scanners, the website contact form, the accounts and job-management software, backup and alarm alerts
02For each one, find out how it signs in. A mailbox name and password in its settings means it is affected
03Ask each vendor one specific question: does this model support modern sign-in for Microsoft 365, and from which firmware or version
04Update the ones with a good answer, pick a replacement route for the ones without, and note the lot somewhere your IT can find

We wrote earlier this year about the senders you forgot, because the same cast of machines was silently failing a different email check. It is the same list. If you built it then, you are most of the way through step one already.

Matching the fix to the machine

For a copier bought in the last few years, the answer is often already sitting in a firmware update: the device learns modern sign-in, someone re-authorises it, done. Vendors have had four years of notice, and the good ones used it.

The awkward cases are real, though. Ask an older device's vendor about modern sign-in for Microsoft 365 and you may get a blank look, because only the manufacturer can teach a 2016 scanner a 2026 protocol, and many will not. For those machines there are respectable routes that do not involve replacing hardware that otherwise works. Microsoft's own High Volume Email service exists for exactly this and suits scans going to your own staff. A dedicated email relay service suits software that must reach customers, such as the system sending your invoices. And Direct Send, which some engineers will suggest because it needs no sign-in at all, is fine for internal scans but the wrong tool for anything leaving the building, since unauthenticated mail is precisely what the junk-folder rules exist to punish.

Which route fits which machine is a judgement call, not a formula. When we migrated a firm off its own Exchange server onto Microsoft 365, reconnecting this exact cast of devices was a scheduled part of the job, not a surprise afterwards, and that is the standard worth holding whoever runs your email to.

One more honest note: this change touches Microsoft 365 only. If your email lives elsewhere, your copier's December will be uneventful, and this is one article you get to skip.

The cheap version of December

The expensive version of this story is a Tuesday in December: missing scans, a support call, a hurried override, and the same conversation again next year. The cheap version is an afternoon in September and a vendor question or two.

If nobody owns your Microsoft 365 setup, or the inventory turns up a machine with no good answer, this is bread-and-butter work for us, and telling you a firmware update will do is quicker than selling you anything.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.