Question: Are you working on integrating Microsoft Graph as well?
Question asked by Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS - 7/17/2025 at 11:44 PM
Answered
A question for SmarterMail developers: have you already started working to integrate the new Microsoft Graph standard?

...just to understand what the future holds...
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS
Currently manages 7 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 6 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)
Oliver Replied
Since the end of EWS is very near, I’d be interested to know as well.
Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post Marked As Answer

Microsoft Graph is the gateway for connecting to Microsoft Office365 services; it is not a protocol we implement for clients to access a SmarterMail server.

The "New Outlook" that Microsoft is currently promoting lacks native protocol capabilities. Instead, it communicates through a middle layer of Microsoft servers that access your email on SmarterMail (or other mail servers), processes it, and shares data with hundreds of partners before finally delivering the message to your client.

Because of this architecture and the resulting privacy concerns, it is not GDPR compliant and effectively cannot be used in Europe. Furthermore, the New Outlook does not support on-premise Exchange servers using MAPI. Since SmarterMail also relies on MAPI for Outlook connectivity, the New Outlook is currently incompatible with SmarterMail and Exchange. 

Microsoft's whole email strategy is a disaster right now.  They prioritized trying to monetize everyones email whether you were using Office365, Exchange or a Third Party Mail Server. Its biting them in the ass.

Tim Uzzanti
CEO
SmarterTools Inc.
Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post

BTW, we have been watching Microsoft move to the dark side for a long while. My entire career, starting with building one of the largest Windows hosting companies in the world, before selling it to a public company was Windows only. SmarterTools was created to support that hosting company because no products could support the volume of customers we had. About 4 years ago, we were able to transition 95% of our operations at SmarterTools away from Microsoft and soon after released SmarterMail for Linux.  

In the end, it's been a blessing for us and others. When we were attacked recently, none of our Linux infrastructure was affected. We no longer spend a ton of money on OS licensing, and Linux is far more optimized and efficient, so you get way more out of the hardware.

For laptops/desktops, we are MacOS with a fraction of the IT support necessary to maintain our organization.

Microsoft in our offices has been relegated to machines for QC and a few production servers that run our software to ensure everything runs smoothly. If we didn't need those, we would remove Windows entirely.

We’re seeing a significant trend within our customer base transitioning away from Microsoft, and everyone seems as happy as we are.  

Thought I would share some additional insight into what we have done and why.

We also won't use Azure. It’s a mess and support is almost non-existent, which is a real shame because Microsoft, 15 years ago or so, had one of the best support desks in the business.

Tim Uzzanti
CEO
SmarterTools Inc.
Howell Dell Replied
"Tim Uzzanti: Because of this architecture and the resulting privacy concerns, it is not GDPR compliant and effectively cannot be used in Europe. Furthermore, the New Outlook does not support on-premise Exchange servers using MAPI. Since SmarterMail also relies on MAPI for Outlook connectivity, the New Outlook is currently incompatible with SmarterMail and Exchange."

In the beginning (NT 3.51) I was a big support of Microsoft. About five years ago I watched another vendor of mine to offer a Linux Edition of their software along side of their Windows Edition--initially as horrified. 

Eventually, I saw this anti-consumer behavior going on as Host and a Customer myself and why I suggested migrating to SmarterMail make a Edition. I sure you must have heard the same from many customers. I bet when you looked .NET Core you said we can migrate and must have been a huge surprise.

What surprises me more is that the Windows NT Kernel has not be replaced with the Linux Kernel then make NT the compatible layer. From what I understand Azure Data and Control Planes are likely fully Linux by now. And who knows maybe the above has already happened in the Cloud. MS SQL has been available for Linux for years.

I've know about the issues you raised about Outlook NEW. I've been testing eM Client and its very good. I've been recommending this to my clients.

The ONLY down side that I don't like that eM Client uses their middleware hosted by Hetzner in DE. I would really like to see the middleware implemented as a Service of SmarterMail. This would be good for customers independence and security.

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