Comunication with users flagged as - External on Ms Teams

IBN 4,336

Hello

Please i need your help on this issue.

We have a situation with a user that is contacting me by Ms Teams, and the End-User is not a Guest, or even the domain is not whitelisted.

I checked in Azure on the whitelisted domains and also on Ms Teams admin Portal and I couldn't find any clue regarding this user account.

1 answer

SokiGuo-MSFT 23,561 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-09-14T06:58:45.417+00:00

Hi @IBN

By default, external access is turned on. The external domain setting is Allowed all external domains. As a result, external users could communicate with you directly.

Chatting with external users on the client side will have an External identity. You could see the user's online status and email address. The account information for external users is shown below.

If you want to block communication with external users, you could set up communication with external users as needed in Teams admin center. The methods for setting up external communication are as follows.

In the Teams admin center, go to Users > External access.

Under Choose which domains your users have access to.

For more details about Manage external meetings and chat in Microsoft Teams, you could refer to this link’s table.

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SokiGuo-MSFT 23,561 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-09-16T09:54:34.107+00:00

Hi @IBN
Do you have any update?
If you are not the scenario, we will do other troubleshooting

IBN 4,336 Reputation points

2022-09-26T07:56:35.83+00:00

Thank you for your reply.

As per your request, please find below a Screen shot page of our External access Configuration in Teams Admin center.

I tried to contact our domain account through my skype account and I couldn’t because the domain is not whitelisted in azure for that purpose.

It is crucial to identify and understand why this user was able to contact me through MS Teams without being invited through our internal procedure that you can find below.

The domain is whitelisted.

A user is created as a guest user.

The user receives the email to enable his account and enable MFA.

Finally, the user can communicate using MS Teams with our tenants and users.

SokiGuo-MSFT 23,561 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-09-27T08:33:00.13+00:00

Hi

Allow all external domains: This is the default setting in Teams, and it lets people in your organization find, call, chat, and set up meetings with people external to your organization in any domain. Besides, if you turn off external access in your organization, people outside your organization can still join meetings through anonymous join. This is by the design of Teams.

IBN 4,336 Reputation points

2022-09-28T07:43:25.27+00:00

Thanks for the clarification.

However, this does not explain our situation, or I am not being clear in what I need, or you don’t understand what I need.

We have an ex-employee working for us as a consultant and as part of our onboarding process for consultants, they are invited as a guest and the domain is whitelisted.

However, this user was never invited, and his domain never whitelisted in our tenant.

How is it possible he can contact me directly on Teams using his domain when the domain is not part of our safe domains, and the user has been not invited?

IBN 4,336 Reputation points

2022-09-29T08:55:48.897+00:00

Though I'm not interested in knowing how to do it, but yes understand how this user was able to bypass our rules and communicate directly with me on Teams.

For example, If I try to communicate with my domain if the domain Hotmail.com will not be whitelisted or the target domain will not be whitelisted that will not be possible and normally we do this through Azure not from MS Teams Portal.

SokiGuo-MSFT 23,561 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-09-30T07:03:09.877+00:00

Hi,

The above setting to allow all external domains means that all people outside can contact you directly.

People from external users can contact you directly according to the method below.

If you don't want to contact people from external domains, you can choose other options.

Allow only specific external domains means that only the domain names on your whitelist can contact you.

Block specific domains means that only the domain name you lock down can't contact you, and other domains can still search for you directly.

Block all external domains means that no one outside the organization can contact you.

JimmyYang-MSFT 49,191 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-10-05T09:10:18.593+00:00

@IBN

Just checking in to see if above information was helpful. If you have any further updates on this issue, please feel free to post back.
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