M365 Exchange Online | EWS Block for F1/F3 Licenses Cancelled

On October 16, 2026, Microsoft updated Message Center post MC1191578 and removed the change, apologizing for the inconvenience. The original post dates back to December 2, 2025, with the deadline previously moved from June to October 1, 2026.

Mailboxes with Exchange Online Kiosk, Microsoft 365, or Office 365 F1 and F3 licenses should receive HTTP 403 for EWS requests. Reason: According to the Service Description, these licenses do not include EWS rights, but Microsoft has never enforced this until now.

Anyone running backup, migration, or archiving tools against such mailboxes would have had to relicense to Exchange Online Plan 1 or 2, E3, or E5, or switch the application to Microsoft Graph.

The license deadline is eliminated. You no longer need to upgrade F-licenses just to allow a tool to continue accessing these mailboxes via EWS. The licensing rights themselves remain unchanged: F1, F3, and Kiosk do not include EWS rights; they are simply not enforced.

The announcement does not explicitly confirm that this will remain the case. Anyone running tools on these mailboxes should still plan for the Graph migration.

The general EWS deprecation continues. According to MC1485116 from October 1, 2026, for affected Worldwide tenants, simply setting EWSEnabled = True has no longer been sufficient since October 10, 2026. Additionally, EWSAllowedAppIDs must be maintained; otherwise, applications not on the list will lose EWS access.

Microsoft pre-populated the list on October 8 and 9 based on EWS activity from the past 60 days. Affected products include Outlook for Windows, Classic Outlook for Mac, Excel Power Query, Power BI, and hybrid scenarios. The book *Microsoft 365 for IT Pros 2027* specifies April 1, 2027, as the final shutdown date. MC1485116 does not provide an exact date.

Open the EWS usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center and check which app IDs are active.

You can check the status of the allow list in Exchange Online PowerShell:

`Set-OrganizationConfig -EWSAllowedAppIDs` replaces the entire list. Include all required app IDs with every change.

The cancellation relieves pressure on the licensing issue for frontline mailboxes, but not on the EWS deprecation. The allow list and the April 2027 shutdown date still apply. Use the gained time to inventory EWS usage reports and plan the switch to Graph.