Nylas Enhances Exchange Support with EWS and Service Accounts for Mail

Facilitate service accounts with EWS Mail and bolster the security of your connection.

Tasia Potasinski | September 1, 2020

Nylas has been making massive improvements for our customers in the email realm, from powering email deliverability rates of 99.5% or above, to increasing our P90 response time to ~300ms. Now, our back end infrastructure integrates with EWS mail in addition to EAS mail, and as a result, we’re pleased to announce that we now support service accounts for EWS mail integrations.

Benefits of EWS over EAS

If you’re building an app that integrates with your users’ Exchange email accounts, one of the most modern and secure ways to quickly integrate large numbers of users is via service accounts over EWS (Exchange Web Services). EWS is the most commonly used protocol to integrate with Exchange user data, supplanting EAS which was built in the early 2000’s for pocket PCs. EWS was introduced in the late 2000’s and received wide adoption because it was built for modern, web-based applications.

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Still, the protocol didn’t receive widespread adoption until later on in its life  – though it’s now the clear front-runner. Looking towards the future, Microsoft’s Graph API may very well gain the widest adoption as the usability and feature parity increase over-time, but for now, EWS is the standard, trusted protocol.

Announcing EWS + Service Accounts for Exchange Mail

Nylas is excited to support both EAS and EWS for our customers (and we’re keeping a close eye on the Graph API). With EWS support for mail, your EWS users can sync data more securely than ever, and onboard entire organizations with just a few clicks over Service Accounts (a feature that isn’t supported on EAS, but is supported by EWS).

Now, organization admins can onboard entire Exchange organizations at once to avoid the hassle of authenticating users one at a time, making it drastically easier for large organizations to adopt your application.

Developers can now use Nylas Native Authentication, to construct login flows that allow your customers to authenticate user accounts for an entire organization using a single service account. This ensures a smooth authentication experience that sets the tone for all future email interactions within your application.

Beyond EWS Mail

Nylas supports 100% of email, calendar, and contacts providers out of the box, enabling your users to keep using their calendar provider of choice. Explore what else you can do with your email integration with Nylas.

Get started today by signing up for a free Nylas developer account.

Tasia Potasinski

Tasia is the Director of Product Marketing at Nylas. She's passionate about communications and helping connect the world through APIs. In her free time, she writes and produces music.