Azure b2c Proxy address "history" block assignation of email

Eric Gagnon 21

Hello,

It looks like a bug, I saw other people having similar problem but without hint of a solution,.

I'm working with a AD and B2C directory to simulate what we plan to use in our projet. Today I wanted to asssign my email to a b2c account and it was not working : “update would cause the user to have a proxy address already present on another directory object”

I lost alot of time after verying that the accounts I was using where not using the email to figure out that it was an "history" / assignation in Proxy adress that wad likely blocking the assignation. Note also that "proxy adress" are not listed in the graph api output.

When I change the email adress I can see the previous adress added in proxy adress. You need to click "View more" to see them all

Why is the old adress added there?

Is there a way to fix this without deleting / recreating the account?

Eric

Eric Gagnon 21 Reputation points

2022-09-15T19:39:39.337+00:00

I found that maybe it's a limitation to the use of a personnal account, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65198916/remove-old-proxyaddress-entry-for-user-in-azure-active-directory
Marilee Turscak-MSFT 36,821 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-09-19T23:39:11.043+00:00

Hi @Eric Gagnon ,

Yes, as mentioned in the thread you linked the ProxyAddress attribute for an unlicensed cloud-only user is read only. I am also seeing others report similar behavior and have reached out to the product team to ask about better ways to resolve this issue.
Eric Gagnon 21 Reputation points

2022-09-20T14:08:59.677+00:00
Hello @Marilee Turscak-MSFT ,

Thanks for you answer. I definitely think something could be done to improve the product experience.

I'm waiting for a common environnement access that should have the required licence (to be confirmed) so I was using my personnal account to be able to test some scenario and learn how to use b2c and understand how it works. That limit was unexpected.

What I did was very basic:

Create a b2c user

Change email (note: I also dont undertand why email is stored in two place (b2c local issuer (also uneditable with ui) and email field but that's another subject)

I have read the article on proxy address but still doesnt understand well why this would be some kind of premium feature. Just noticed that if I change email, it get stored there and eventually another email change will look up in that list.

I was able to delete the account and work my way through it but it would surely nice to have a less destructive way to correct the situation or a way to prevent getting stuck in this pattern in the first place.
Gaurav Suresh Soni 0 Reputation points

2023-07-26T11:00:03.2166667+00:00

I am also facing the same issue and still there is no way to get out of this situation. I am using the prod environment so it is not feasible solution to remove user and add again. Any updates on this?
someone-somewhere 0 Reputation points

2023-09-18T21:06:27.88+00:00

@Marilee Turscak-MSFT Any update on this?

I just have tried again to rewrite the adresses using microsoft graph api and it looks it's not possible (no errors).

We have a manual onboarding (no self-registration) where there is the possibility of email typing error that could be email of another user as name.

Currently, the only option to fix that seem to delete the user (that would contain blocking proxyadresses).

There underlying of azure AD bleed into Azure b2c with many odd bugs or difficult to understand behaviors.

In this case, there will never be any Microsoft 360 licence / Ad sync in the context of b2c. Why do we have to suffer that?
someone-somewhere 0 Reputation points

2023-09-28T17:58:57.37+00:00

@Marilee Turscak-MSFT We where able to figure out a solution.

I have notived that when we created a user throught the portail, email was null and proxyAdress stays empty.

If I remember well, a few months ago when doing the same test it was seen as a bug because the user object had a null email when using graph api (email was present in token).

So the simple solution is to not try to synchronise ourselves the mail field because when we do so it also modify proxyAdress.

Not confident with what this will lead us through long term but that's the product experience so far.
Dan Curtiss 0 Reputation points

2024-03-07T21:35:59.7366667+00:00
@Marilee Turscak-MSFT Was there ever a resolution to this?

We use Azure B2C and have the requirement that users be able to change their email address, but once an email is used by a user it can never be used again unless the original user is deleted.

Ideally, we'd need one of these options:

Way to update this field via Graph

A setting to not populate this field at all

Ability to create user without conflict if email address exists as proxy address

If there is no plan to support any of these options please let me know so that we can plan accordingly. Option above to not set "mail" property is not an option for our use case.

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Azure b2c Proxy address "history" block assignation of email

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