How to change AzureAD user contact email address

Question

Recently I renamed an Office 365 account from a user who left the company to the user who took that position. I change the email address, the name, etc.. However AzureAD has the wrong email address under the contact information. Strangely enough, the new user receives email, sends email, nothing appears to be broken until you try to do something like share a folder in OneDrive. The folder does share to the new user, however, the person initiating the share receives an "undeliverable" email stating that the former email address (that from the original user) can't be found.

I have looked and looked and have only found the original email address in this one field. When I try to change it, a check mark appears on the right and then I click save and the email address reverts. The audit log says I successfully modified the user, but it is not actually changing.

Any thoughts? I am signed in as a global admin.

Answer 1

Hi @Marcus Johnson

Did you change the contact information via Microsoft 365 admin center?
Reference: Change a user name and email address

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Answer 2

After many back and forth emails and sessions with Microsoft support, this is resolved. The resolution is bizarre.
Yes, you can change the email address in the Azure Portal contact information area. NO YOU CANNOT use the user's email address.
However, if you use any other address, in this case I used my gmail email address. Azure happily reports that it the change is saved, but does NOT use the gmail address. It replaces it with the correct user address. Riddle me that Bat Man.

Answer 3

I had this same problem though I have a hybrid environment.

How I fixed it:

Using ADUC, Move the on-prem user to an OU not synchronized with Azure (check your AD Connect config if you don't know which OU is not synched)
If you have multiple DCs, manually sync them. Then from the AD Connect server execute a Delta Sync to Azure.

When that completes check in AzureAD (refresh the web page, often). The user should now be in the Deleted Users blade.

Choose the user and click restore.

The user will now appear as an Azure only user. The contact information section is no longer greyed out and the email address can successfully be edited.

Now, go back to ADUC and move the user back to the correct OU, sync your DC's (if more than one) and run another delta sync on the AD Connect Server. After rerunning the sync several times and refreshing the AzureAD page the user in AzureAD finally displayed as on-prem. User has MFA enabled and experienced no issues.