Legacy Outlook for Mac from 01 October 2026

Although they have similar timing, the retirement of EWS and the end of support for Legacy Outlook for Mac are 2 entirely different things.

The EWS retirement affects Legacy Outlook for Mac users which are connecting to Exchange Online. This includes M365 Business, Enterprise, Education and Outlook.com users. If you need to continue to connect to Exchange Online, you'll need to switch from Legacy Outlook for Mac to Outlook for Mac.

End of support for Legacy Outlook for Mac will not cripple the software. You can continue to use it with any supported mailing service such as Gmail.

However, when it is part of your Microsoft 365 Personal or Home subscription, Microsoft will no longer allow you to create support cases with them after October 2026. Updates after this date are also no longer guaranteed and at the discretion of Microsoft (in praxis this means only a few high-profile Security Updates).

Since Legacy Outlook for Mac is still supported in M365 Business and Enterprise plans, as well as for Office LTSC 2024 licenses, it could be that these updates are also still pushed to M365 Personal/Home users. This still doesn't mean that Microsoft supports these license types in case of issues.

Regardless of any of this, backups are always a good idea when storing things only locally ;-)