The short version — Amazon WorkMail stopped accepting new customers on 30 April 2026 and shuts down entirely on 31 March 2027, after which mailbox data is deleted. This is not a price rise you can absorb or a feature you can work around: there is a date, and after it your mail is gone. The good news is that WorkMail speaks standard IMAP, so everything you have can be copied out intact — and if you move before the rush, you can run the old and new mailboxes side by side until you're satisfied.
What is actually happening
AWS announced the end of Amazon WorkMail in 2026: no new customers from 30 April 2026, service termination on 31 March 2027, and deletion of customer data thereafter. Existing organisations keep working until that date. Nothing breaks tomorrow.
What that means in practice:
- You have a hard deadline, not a preference. Every other migration guide on this site is about whether a move is worth it. This one isn't. The only question is when you do it and how calm it is.
- Your domain is the part that matters. Mailboxes are replaceable. The address people already have for you is not. If your mail is at
you@yourcompany.com, you are in good shape — the domain moves with you and nobody has to learn a new address. - If you used an
awsapps.comaddress, that address is going away. There is no way to keep it. Getting onto a domain you own is the migration, not an optional extra.
Do this first: check what you actually have
Before choosing anything, spend ten minutes establishing three facts.
- Whose domain is it? Log in to your registrar (often Route 53 for WorkMail customers) and confirm you control the domain and its DNS. Everything downstream depends on this.
- How many mailboxes, and how big? WorkMail's console lists them. The total size tells you how long an import takes — a few gigabytes is an evening, tens of gigabytes is a weekend of background copying.
- What else is attached? Calendars, contacts, resource mailboxes, distribution lists, and anything doing Exchange ActiveSync on phones. Mail is easy to move; those need decisions.
Choosing where to go — including when it shouldn't be us
WorkMail served two quite different customers, and they need different answers.
If you're a company with staff, shared calendars, and ActiveSync on managed phones, you want Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. That is the honest answer. They are per-user and more expensive, and they are what WorkMail was standing in for. MailHow is not a Workspace replacement and we would rather tell you now than take a year of your subscription and disappoint you.
If you're one person — a founder, a consultant, a small team where "shared mailbox" means two people — with one or several domains, that's exactly what MailHow is for, and the per-user pricing you were avoiding with WorkMail doesn't come back. One flat $29/year covers every domain you own, and receiving is free forever, which matters a lot for the way this particular migration should be done (see below).
Either way, the steps that follow are the same up to the point where you pick a destination.
The migration, step by step
The trick is that you never have to cut over blind. Run both for a while.
1. Connect your domain to the new host first — while WorkMail still runs
At MailHow, connecting a domain and receiving mail is free, with no card. Add the domain, publish the DNS records we give you (we publish them for you if your DNS is somewhere we can reach), and verify. Nothing about your live mail changes yet: WorkMail still has your MX record, so mail still goes there.
2. Copy your mail across over IMAP
WorkMail supports IMAP, which means every message, folder, flag and read/unread state can be copied to the new mailbox without touching the original. Point our import at your WorkMail server (imap.mail.<region>.awsapps.com, port 993, your WorkMail address and password) and let it run. Large mailboxes take hours; you can keep using WorkMail throughout.
Copy, not move: nothing is deleted from WorkMail. If you change your mind, you have lost nothing but time.
3. Deal with calendars and contacts deliberately
Export calendars as .ics and contacts as .vcf from whatever client you use with WorkMail, then import them into the new account. MailHow gives you a calendar and an address book on the same account, synced over CalDAV/CardDAV, so your phone picks them up the same way.
If you have resource mailboxes or distribution lists, write down what each one does before it disappears — most turn into either a plain address or a forwarding rule, and both are easy once you know the intent.
4. Switch MX when — and only when — you're happy
This is the actual cutover, and it's one DNS change. Point your domain's MX record at the new host. Mail that was already in flight to WorkMail lands there; everything after arrives at the new mailbox. Because you did step 2 first, your history is already on both sides.
Give it 24–48 hours before you consider the move done. Then do a final IMAP sync to catch the last few messages that arrived at WorkMail during the transition.
5. Send, and then turn WorkMail off
Send a test message to a Gmail address and check it arrives in the inbox rather than spam — that tells you SPF, DKIM and DMARC are right on the new host. Once you're satisfied, and not before, close the WorkMail organisation.
Don't wait for March 2027
Two reasons, both practical.
Migration support gets worse as a shutdown approaches, not better. Everyone moves in the last quarter. Do it in a quiet month and you have the whole internet's attention if something goes wrong.
A deadline removes your fallback. Right now, if a migration goes sideways, WorkMail is still there and you can go back. In February 2027 that stops being true.
What this really taught everyone
WorkMail's customers did nothing wrong, and their mail is being switched off anyway. The only durable protection against that is to hold the address yourself: your own domain, pointed at whichever provider is best today, repointable at whichever is best in five years without telling a single person a new address.
That is the whole argument for email on your own domain, and if you are reading this you have just lived it.
Moving from Amazon WorkMail? Connecting your domain and receiving mail on MailHow is free, so you can set the destination up and copy your mail across long before you touch your MX record. Sending is $29/year, flat, for every domain you own.