The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook
Exchange Web Services (EWS) is approaching end of service in Exchange Online. We first announced this change was coming in 2018, when we announced that Exchange Web Services (EWS) will no longer receive functionality updates. In 2023, we announced that EWS will be disabled in Exchange Online in October 2026.
Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027.
Microsoft announced the upcoming end of service for Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online. Apple is actively working with Microsoft to update Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders to use the Graph API in a future update to macOS 27, including a declarative configuration for device management services.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting Apple’s migration to Microsoft’s newer Graph API because EWS support in Apple Mail has long been buggy. It seems to have gotten worse in recent months, presumably due to server side changes as Microsoft prepares to shut it all down. Unfortunately, Apple is not as far along in the transition as I’d expected.
Jonathan Harbourne (and, alas, Claude):
What made a Mac feel like a Mac at work was the software that came with it. Mail that you could actually scan. A Calendar that was a separate application, so it could live permanently on a second screen instead of hiding behind a tab. Quick Look. Smart mailboxes. Spotlight that found things. Share sheets that worked everywhere. The system behaving as one coherent thing rather than a collection of vendor silos.
[…]
iOS and iPadOS Mail no longer depend on EWS. macOS Mail still does. Same company, same deadline, same protocol, and only one of the two platforms got the work done in time. Microsoft ended up writing the guidance Apple should have written, telling administrators in February that Apple Mail for Mac users would have to switch to Outlook until the applications were updated. […] Apple had years. It had a public deadline. It had, by Microsoft’s own account, one of the most widely used EWS applications in existence. And it let the clock run out.
[…]
Somewhere in every one of these migrations is a line in a change log that reads “users to move to Outlook”, as though a mail client were a fungible commodity, like swapping a stapler. […] This is not the death of the Mac at work. […] It is the death of the Mac experience at work.
Outlook for Mac feels very different from Apple Mail, and users are being squeezed from the Microsoft side, too. Microsoft will be ending the transition to New Outlook in October, but the new version is still missing many features that were present in Legacy Outlook (as well as Apple Mail). Microsoft had long promised that it would implement AppleScript in New Outlook before dropping support for the old version, but last week it changed course:
AppleScript workflows vary widely across organizations and often depend on behaviors from the classic app that don’t exist in the New Outlook. Because these patterns can’t be standardized, full compatibility isn’t feasible. We have decided not to move forward with this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Back to Harbourne:
Access only ratchets one way. Mail was allowed because it worked, quietly, for years, over a protocol nobody was auditing. It has now been formally removed under a named cybersecurity policy. Getting it back would require someone in a security function to write a positive case for re-admitting a broad-permission third-party client to the corporate mail estate, and then put their name on it. Nobody’s career improves by doing that. Saying no costs nothing and is never wrong in hindsight.
So if Apple ships Graph support in Mail next year, the people who lost it will not get it back. The door didn’t swing shut. It was bolted, and the reason it was bolted is now written down in a policy document that will outlive the protocol that prompted it.
Apple has no leverage to change that, either. The organisations deploying Macs by the tens of thousands are not Apple partners in any meaningful sense. They are customers who buy boxes. There is no relationship to call on, no joint roadmap, no account team, nobody at Apple whose job it is to notice that a hundred thousand people just lost Mail.
October is when administrators will have to opt back into allowing EWS for a few more months, but some (like Harbourne’s) will be switching off support sooner.
Apple Mail and Outlook aren’t the only options, though. MailMaven supports both Graph and AppleScript.
Previously:
- MailMaven 1.2
- Bricking Microsoft Office 2019
- SpamSieve 3.2
- Microsoft Adds Free Outlook Tier
- “New Look” Outlook Shipping in October
Update (2026-08-21): See also: Reddit and Mac Power Users.
Update (2026-08-24): See also: Mac Power Users.
Previously:
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I still think that the new Outlook is a significant step back in terms of functionality compared to Entourage. I suspect many, many, many of the users kicked out of Mail for their Exchange account will not see the transition favorably…
IT folks in large institutions will have a LOT of angry calls to answer when that happens.
Yeah, I've been waiting for that to happen for a while, especially since I need Graph to work. Would never think to use MailHaven, though, not with that UI.
Entourage was like the Millennium Falcon, but for email: "She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid" — when it was ripped from our hands and we were given Outlook, it felt too sanitized and is still missing our favorite features from that distant era. What I wouldn't give for the Project Center again!
Also: Hello Corentin! Long time, no see!
A good way to be outraged, if you care about this sort of thing, is to review Outlook’s interface with Accessibility Inspector. It’s a nested debacle of unnamed objects. Basically, a web-style interface stuck in a Mac window. Garbage.
It is a web style garbage. That was Microslop’s plan from years ago; hire web devs on the cheap and give them React “Native” to be “productive” (in a “hurr durr im using compoooter” kind of a way). It shows across their product range. Even the 11 Start menu is half R”N” and thus a slow mess. It’s truly embarrassing.
Is this why someone contacting me re a job told me a day or 2 back "Outlook is telling me Security or policy settings at me.com have rejected my email message' !?
Seemed odd never had anything like that before.
Luckily they had the option to send the message via my web gallery - but since then all mails via me.com are OK again!
A bit disconcerting I thought email was a 'mature' technology.
WTF. So Apple Mail on macOS cannot connect to Exchange after Oct 26 unless the server admin manually enables a legacy feature?
And what makes it even more embarrassing is that Apple has already implemented the necessary work on iOS and just forgot or didn't bother to also integrate it into macOS Mail in time?
Another case of Apple implementing a feature and then abandoning it after the initial marketing razzle-dazzle has died down. Either maintain, support and upgrade included features or rip them out of the OS if they are half-baked and you're not going to give them the required ongoing attention.
Having just had to use Apple's SMB implementation to connect to a new NAS (which apparently includes major regressions in the Apple Silicon implementation) it's another reminder of the shit-show that is modern day Apple software.
Craig you've had a good run... time for you to hand it over to someone who actually prioritises quality instead of just talking about it.
@Léo We're 10 years downstream of "Everyone can Code" cost-cutting, Leetcode standardized interviews, and HR-driven hiring practices. No Big Corp makes good native apps for their platforms anymore. You can name any exceptions on one hand. A complete inversion of quality and purpose.
> Would never think to use MailHaven, though, not with that UI.
MailMaven's UI is quite customizable.
Does this mean you will have to update to macOS 27 if you want to continue to use Mail in a business environment? When did Apple know about this coming? Five years ago? (Checked it: Deprecated in 2018, shutdown date announced in 2023)
I imagine internal meetings where they ask: “People that do not need a faster computer will not buy a new one unless they have to. What can we break to get rid of all Intel Macs?”
They decided to make the first version of the new UI the last version for those machines, knowing there will be flaws that will never be fixed, while pushing people hard to install it. They deprecated or removed some features (AFP, some kinds of encrypted TimeMachine) so people have to invest nearly as much work as if they upgraded to a new machine. Last but not least they delayed all kind of updates strategically.
People at Apple will say that’s totally not how it is done. But as someone outside of Apple, let me tell you: That’s what it feels/looks like. Even if you internally discuss it and have bad feeling about it but you “just couldn’t do it any other way”: Did you ever propose to delay the release by six month? See! There is an other way. You just choose not to take it.
Back when we were using EWS in 2010-2016 to communicate with (on-premises) Exchange, all the new rage was ActiveSync, which allowed for push, very efficient data exchange, etc. It did require a paid license from MS, if I remember correctly. I didn't even know Apple supported EWS on the iPhone. I switched from Google to Outlook for my private mail since Google decoded at some point to limit their implementation of ActiveSync to the paid version of Gmail, so the only option for communicating with Gmail on iOS was IMAP. I've been out of the loop from this world in so many years, I don't even know what "Graph API" is.
From a cursory look, it seems that nowadays even Exchange ActiveSync is considered "legacy". 😂
@Michael,
Thanks for posting this. I use MS Exchange for my email server. I had absolutely no idea about this. I regularly get e-mails from MS warning me changes that don't matter to me, but nothing about all my e-mail going away.
But I'm not blaming MS for this EWS problem. They announced the deprecation in 2018. You know who else typically discontinues technologies 9 years after announcing a deprecation? Apple. They did that with AFP, 32-bit software, some other things I can't remember. I used to complain when 3rd party products stopped working and/or tried to force people to upgrade after Apple gave them 9 years warning. I won't be doing that anymore. It's not like Apple didn't know. Apple supports the new protocols on iOS, just not on the Mac.
I won't be updating all my computers to 27 and hoping that Apple can rewrite Mail in a few months. But I'm also going to dump Microsoft.
@macfixer nice to see you too :-)
Although, until Mail supports Graph REST APIs, we can look forward to being able to order Starbucks coffee straight from Outlook thanks to the "wonderful" plug-in support :->
Mail has its limits, but it is miles ahead in terms of functionality and customizability compared to Outlook. And the integration into the general Apple ecosystem is going to be problematic too.
macOS 27 is all about the new Siri and data awareness. I suspect there won't be much to expect there when all emails will have to migrate to Outlook where things tend to be lock out of access. We'll see I guess.
Apple Mail's lousy handling of Microsoft email was for me the straw that finally broke the camel's back. Well, more like a large slab of concrete that broke the camels back, to belabor the metaphor. I missed a bunch of time sensitive work emails because it just decided to break.
I have switched to MailMaven and have been quite pleased with it so far. It's not as responsive as I might like but at least it's not a glorified web app and it's been reliable so far, which is more than I can say for anything Apple maintains at this point.
> MailMaven's UI is quite customizable.
So there's a way to turn off the ugly stick? Seriously, if it can be made to look as plain and unfettered as Mail.app then I might be interested. But that riot of color and waste of screen real estate with widgetry is an instant turn-off for me.
Apparently, Thunderbird 154.0 now supports the Graph REST API (https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/154.0/releasenotes/).
I haven't tested it myself, but I read on some blog that it supports Graph for emails, but not yet for contacts and calendars.
ActiveSync is what iOS mail and calendar use. Given that licensing ActiveSync requires you to certify things like disc encryption, screen locks, remote wipes, etc are available, it's difficult to make that happen on an app that's on a full-fledged operating system.
Graph is a third interface.
That said, yes Apple has had time and chosen to let the car run off the cliff.
ActiveSync's not all that. The main attraction is push, but Apple said (to the authors of Stalwart) that they'd IETF-standardise push email. Just stick to the standard protocols and all will be well, people.
As to the email client scene in general, New Outlook uses backend infrastructure to sync; wave goodbye to privacy, as well as a decent UI. MailMate and MailMaven are subscription software and, though MailMate is clearly more to my taste, the accessibility doesn't get any better. Perhaps MailMaven could be customised to be less of an all-singing all-dancing tag-and-smart-mailbox-based experience, but if so I really must get up the gumption and configure all the settings. Thunderbird? Pffft, only if there's no other option, but at least it's actually functional; ditto just using SnappyMail or a similar web frontend.
And I still haven't given up thought of a vibecoded app. Because, although it pains me to think of knicking the hard work of others, Apple Mail's continued descent into neglect and dysfunction means that the Windows environment would actually give me a more accessible choice in Thunderbird, and the truth is that my needs are very modest—actually, just something like a Mailsmith with maildir++ for storage would suit me fine.
@Sebby MailMaven uses the Sketch model (pay for a year of updates but what you have keeps working), not a subscription (unless you want their tag syncing service).
The Thunderbird folks posted about their implementation of the support for the Graph API today.
It provides a lot of interesting details:
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2026/09/thunderbird-desktop-new-protocol-support-microsoft-graph-api/
Welp, here we are Sep 10 and all of a sudden my Mail app on macOS 27 RC has stopped working with my o365 account. Shame on Apple for not putting in the effort to ship Mail with proper support for MS Graph API.
I tried enabling using the "defaults write com.apple.mail Mail/GraphMail -bool true" in terminal but it made no difference. Mail is still using EWS protocol to talk to the o365 mail servers. Hope the macOS 27.1 beta comes out before Oct 1st with some attempt to get the Graph API working in Mail or else it's pretty much game over.
Looks like DAVMail supports Graph, so worst comes to worst you can just adapt your existing software.
But, yeah, it's really quite extraordinary that Apple have left it this late. As an Apple customer, it must be reassuring to know that they are at least as indifferent to interoperability as Microsoft are!
