How to configure email address for a user in Microsoft Azure AD?

Question

I have created a trial account for Microsoft Azure. In Azure Active Directory, I'm trying to create a new user, but I'm not seeing email address field. I see only username, firstname, lastname and display name fields. Will Azure treat username (like [email protected]) as an email? or I'm I missing something? I didn't find much information in its documentation.

Answer 1

No, Azure AD will not assume that the username (known as "UserPrincipalName", in the Azure AD Graph API and Azure AD PowerShell module) is actually an email address that can receive emails.

If you would simply want a place to store a given user's email address (one that actually has a mailbox behind it), you can use the "Alternate Email Address" field in the Azure Portal (under "Profile" section for a given user in your directory):

(Note: This field is known as otherMails in Azure AD Graph API, AlternateEmailAddresses in Azure AD PowerShell v1 (MSOnline), and OtherMails in Azure AD PowerShell v2 (AzureAD). In all cases, it's an array of strings, not a single value.)

You can create more user-friendly usernames by adding and verifying a custom domain name to you Azure AD directory: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-add-domain. Once you've done this, you can create users that have usernames such as [email protected] (assuming contoso.com is the domain you added).

At this point, it may be that [email protected] is also the email address of that user, but again—there is no assumption in Azure AD that this is the case.