Announcing general availability of the mailbox import and export Microsoft Graph APIs

We’re excited to announce the general availability (GA) of the mailbox import and export Microsoft Graph APIs. After a successful public preview period, these APIs are now ready for production use, enabling organizations and developers worldwide to efficiently manage, migrate, and integrate mailbox data in Exchange Online through Microsoft Graph. 

Last year, we introduced the mailbox import and export APIs public preview to provide a modern, robust alternative to the legacy Exchange Web Services (EWS) APIs. With the planned deprecation of EWS, our customers needed a secure, scalable, and future-ready solution for full-fidelity import and export of their Exchange Online mailbox data. Throughout the preview, we received feedback from our community that helped us refine and enhance these APIs for production environments. 

Key features now generally available 

• Mailbox hierarchy discovery: Drill down into mailbox structures, access folders and subfolders, and enumerate individual mailbox items. 

• Full-fidelity support for mailbox items: Access all types of mailbox items—including messages, contacts, and calendar entries—within the IPM subtree. 

• Folder management: Create, update, and delete mailbox folders, to organize mailbox content as needed. 

• Extended properties: Use single-value and multi-value extended properties on folders and items to enable custom data scenarios that standard Microsoft Graph metadata doesn’t cover. 

• Granular permission scopes: Apply fine-tuned controls over access, ensuring that applications and users can only read, export, or import mailbox data as required for their use cases. 

Supported scope 

The initial GA release supports: 

• Primary mailboxes 

• Shared mailboxes  

The following mailbox types are not included in the initial GA release: 

• Archive mailboxes 

• Public folders 

• Group mailboxes 

We know these additional types of mailboxes matter to many customers and partners, especially as they continue planning EWS migrations. Work in these areas is ongoing, and we’ll share more updates on progress soon. 

The exported item format is intentionally opaque and is designed to preserve item fidelity rather than to serve as a general-purpose interchangeable format. That means the correct and supported pattern is to export an item, preserve the returned stream, and use it for importing back into an Exchange Online mailbox. 

Throttling, transportability, and production expectations 

The mailbox import and export APIs use the same standard Outlook resource limits that apply elsewhere in Microsoft Graph.  

Learn more and get started 

If you evaluated the APIs in preview, the API model remains largely unchanged, so moving to GA should be a straightforward step for primary and shared mailbox scenarios. If you’re new to the API, start with the Use the mailbox import and export APIs in Microsoft Graph Microsoft Learn article, then review the import and export methods that map to your scenario.