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
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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.
