sharepoint online email received on deleted AD account, but account wasnt deleted and is still active

Question

Hi, a user at my workplace received an email from no-reply@sharepointonline.com indicating one of her employees <"Names" account has been deleted from the Active Directory. Their OneDrive for Business will be preserved for 30 days.....etc.>
The account was not deleted, and is still active on AD. Nothing in the logs indicate it has been deactivated and activated again either.

Do you know why she might have received this email?

Answer 1

Hi @Raheem Anderson ，

Under normal circumstances, this will only happen if the Azure AD user is deleted.

1.Please check M365 Admin center, whether the account is in Active Users or Deleted Users.

2.Have you checked whether the user has been deleted through the Audit log? If not, you can check to see if there is a delete record.

Go to https://compliance.microsoft.com and sign in. In the left pane of the compliance portal, select Audit.

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Answer 2

This is just a dumb wording issue with the automated emails. Imagine the scenario where Janet is Jim's supervisor and Jim gets fired. When Jim's account is disabled but not yet deleted, a lot of organizations have it setup to give "ownership" of the account to his supervisor so she can access Jim's email/onedrive. So now Janet "owns" Jim's account and that account is finally deleted from AD.

Here is where the wording gets stupid. Instead of saying "An account Janet owns has been deleted" it says, "Janet's account has been deleted". But if you look at the onedrive sharing URL at the bottom of the message it will have Jim's username somewhere in it.