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Exchange Web Services for Mailbox Access

Mail Manager

Article from ADMIN 60/2020

By Christian Schulenburg

Exchange Web Services (EWS) is an important interface that lets applications access Exchange content. You can access the EWS mailbox via PowerShell or create your own tools.

Most administrators are familiar with the Exchange Web Services from the virtual directories and as a means for Outlook to publish out-of-office messages. But the services can do much more and provide useful functions such as sorting out attachments. In this article, we look at EWS mailbox access via PowerShell and possibilities for in-house development.

Exchange Web Services (EWS) is an important interface that lets applications access Exchange content. Outlook uses the services to call the availability service and the Out of Office Wizard, among other things. Exchange has been using EWS since version 2007, which is the basic prerequisite for using the corresponding API. In addition, you need the Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.2 [1].

If you only use Exchange locally, the EWS API is available as described below. However, Microsoft 365 previously had different interfaces for the different tools. For Exchange, it was the EWS interface presented here, among others.

In the future, Microsoft Graph will serve as the central access point for the interaction of the various services in Microsoft 365. However, it is not directly available for a local Exchange and only in hybrid environments will you be able to access local Exchange environments via Microsoft Graph. Furthermore, EWS will no longer receive function updates in Exchange Online [2].

Disabling Exchange Basic Authentication

For Exchange, basic authentication was, for a long time, a fast way to log on – always active and easy to use. However, it offers a greater potential for attack, and additional security mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication are often not used because of their complexity.

For this reason, Microsoft decided as early as 2018 to switch off basic authentication for EWS at Exchange

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