External User Work Email Value Changed - Who Changed It?

Question

I noticed that I was getting rejected emails when trying to send to some of our external users. Upon checking their profiles, I can see that the value in the Work Email field had been changed from:

*** Email address is removed for privacy ***

to

user_domain.com#EXT#@[our tenant].onmicrosoft.com

which is not a valid email address, and that is why the emails are being undelivered.

How do I find out what or who changed that value? Our users cannot and have not edited the profiles, so I need help identifying what process might be doing this. It is a problem because our business partners need to receive alerts from SharePoint.

Edited to add:  It looks like the user name is being copied over the email address. That's fine for internal users--it's accurate. But not for External Users. I have no Global Admin access, so I don't know how to confirm when/if the AD sync caused this.

Answer 1

I'm sorry, but I have to say I am very disappointed in this approach. Removing these 12 users and adding them again will correct the problem--obviously. But that does nothing to tell me how they were changed in the first place so that I can feel assured that next full profile crawl or directory sync won't do this to our hundreds of other external users. This solution absolutely will not scale in any practical way.

All of the external users in our system as of one week ago were altered. It seems that, if this information is in a database, there should be a way to tell when the change occurred and why.  Altering the records does not prevent it from happening again.

Is there no option for us to find out why it happened?

Answer 2

Hi Ronnie,

Thanks for clarifying the situation. An external user’s profile is synced from the Office 365 directory, so given that the Work Email property is incorrect, I would suggest that the global admin completely remove this external user from your tenant. Then re-add this user to the Office 365 directory by re-sharing the items with this user and check the outcome.

Below are the steps to remove a user from the Office 365 directory:

1. As an Office 365 global admin, go to Office 365 admin center > USERS > Active Users. Find and delete the affected external user account.
2. Go to the Office 365 SharePoint Admin center > user profiles >Manage User Profiles > find the external users and delete the affected user
3. Delete the external users from all site collections:

    a. As a global administrator, go to the site collections in which the external user is invited.

    b. Open a new tab in the browser, and enter <site collection URL>/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0.

    c. In the "People and Groups : All People" page, delete the target external user from these site collections.

4. Use SharePoint PowerShell to check whether you can get that external user. If so, delete that user. Here are the steps to use SharePoint PowerShell:

    a. Download the PowerShell and connect it according to this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161372(v=office.15).aspx

    b. Get all external users by running Get-SPOExternalUser -Pagesize 20    c. Delete that unique external user by running Remove-SPOExternalUser -UniqueIDs <UniqueIds>    d. Wait for a while, and then run Get-SPOExternalUser -Pagesize 20 to see if the external user has been removed completely.

5. If you use the same browser to share with the external user that you’ve shared with before, please remove the browser cache since the People picker cache will remain even though the external user is fully removed from SharePoint Online.

    To do this in Internet Explorer, follow the steps in this article: Viewing and deleting your browsing history

    When you clear the cache, make sure that you also select the Cookies and website data option. For the detailed information, please refer to the article:How to remove users from SharePoint Online

After making sure that you completely remove the affected user from the SharePoint site, please re-share the documents with this user’s email address and check the outcome.

If the problem persists, we’d like to collect information below:

1).  Does the problem occur to specific users? Please provide the affected user accounts.

2).  The tenant domain name (like contoso.onmicrosoft.com).

3).  The Global Admin's Email address and Display Name.

4).  A contactable Email address.

I have sent you a message for the requested information, you can access it via the link below:

https://community.office365.com/user/conversations

Regards,

Jerry

Answer 3

a screen shot of the email:


a screen shot of the user profile in sharepoint administration (i am the sharepoint administrator, so i can edit user profiles)


Answer 4

You are not getting the issue.

The WORK EMAIL field is being replaced by the USER ACCOUNT field.

The emails are being rejected as undeliverable by the server because the WORK EMAIL FIELD contains data that is no longer a valid email address.  Please read my original post.

Answer 5

hi ronnie,

firstly, i’d like to explain that an external user is expected to be stored as the form: user_domain.com#ext#@[companytenant].onmicrosoft.com in an organization’s sharepoint user directory.


this external user cannot be edited in the office 365 admin center.

regarding “i was getting rejected emails when trying to send to some of our external users.”, i’d like to confirm whether you were sharing sharepoint files with this user. if so, there might be several factors that the sharing request is rejected.

1. for the first time sharing items with this user, the request will show up in the access requests and invitations from the site settings, the site collection administrators have the capability to withdraw the invitation.
2. in site settings > site permissions > permimssions ribbon > access request settings, if allow access request is turned on, the site will specify an email address to control all the sharing request to this site.
3. if your situation doesn’t match the above options, we suggest you perform the steps below and provide the information we need for investigation:

    1). a screenshot of the rejected emails and screenshots if there are any error messages. to upload screenshots, click use rich formatting in this thread and select insert/edit media.

    2). follow the steps of my verified answer in the thread below to completely remove the external user from the tenant and then re-share the item to this user and check the outcome.

          https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/154/p/403616/993547#993547

regards,

jerry