Apple Mail - Office 365 access days are numbered?

Software
1

I recently decided that, as much as I prefer using Apple Mail for my work Office 365 account, the native syncing and functionality of using Outlook outweighed whatever other aesthetic and functional preferences I had for using Apple Mail to access the account. Upon doing some digging, I ran across this, stating that EWS (the method Apple Mail uses to access Office 365 accounts), is going to be deprecated relatively soon. In the future, app developers will only be able to access Office 365 accounts via something called “Graph.” https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-to-start-retiring-exchange-web-services-in-october-2026/

So, it seems that once this deprecation happens, apps like Apple Mail (which use EWS) will not be able to access Office 365 accounts, and other apps like Spark (which use IMAP) won’t be able to, either. In other words, for Office 365, Apple Mail is a dead man walking.

Am I missing something? Why haven’t I seen any discussion of this before now?

2

Because

  1. The majority of people won’t know about this
  2. Corporate departments tend to restrict their users to Outlook instead of allowing the use of 3rd party clients to prevent data loss
  3. It’s quite possible that Apple and other clients are already planning for this (e.g. adopting Graph)
  4. As and when this happens, if it no longer works in 3rd party clients, they’ll just point at Microsoft for using a proprietary, non standard connection protocol.
  5. and finally, it’s 18 months away, there’s no news here yet until there’s some conflict.
4 Likes
3

Graph is the unified API endpoint for all M365 services, including Outlook. It’s been around for quite a while, and widely published in the developer community. Anyone doing work with Outlook should know about it. Whether they do anything with the knowledge … anyone’s guess.

Katie

3 Likes
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@geoffaire all 100% sensible points. Apple is certainly capable of making the switch if they decide it’s worth it. Do you agree that account sync and stability is always going to be more stable with using Microsoft’s own app (Outlook), or have I exaggerated that? Granted it worked MOST of the time, but the handful of hiccups were more than I wanted to put up with.

5

IMAP is an established and stable protocol, so I wouldn’t think that either is better than the other.

MS may have some additional features in Graph which makes it work better for them.

6

Not convinced that this will have much effect on me. I only have one Microsoft/Office365 product on my Macs namely the email component as that is what my language school uses with — forces on — students to send out course and admin notices. Rather than pollute my Macs/iPhone/iPad I choose to access those email with the web version.

7

Is the claim that Outlook 365 isn’t going to support IMAP anymore? Or just that it won’t support the old Exchange protocols anymore? I see nothing to indicate that Microsoft is dropping IMAP support.

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You’re right. I misspoke. They have not publicly announced any plan to deprecate IMAP support. I suppose it’s possible, but it’s not been announced that they are planning that.