Contacts

View & Edit Contacts in your M365 tenants

This page lists the Exchange Online mail contacts in the selected tenant. Mail contacts are external recipients that appear in the Global Address List but have no mailbox in the tenant, so they are the usual way of publishing a supplier, a helpdesk address, or a shared inbox belonging to another organisation. Contacts can be created one at a time or pushed out in bulk from a saved template.

Action Buttons

Add Contact

Opens a drawer that creates a mail contact in the currently selected tenant. Only the display name and email address are required, and everything else can be filled in later from Edit Contact.

Field	Description
Display Name	The name the contact is listed under. Required.
First Name	The contact's first name.
Last Name	The contact's last name.
Email	The external address mail to the contact is delivered to. Required, and validated as an email address.
Hide from Global Address List	Keeps the contact out of the Global Address List so it can still be addressed directly but is not browsable.
Job Title	The contact's job title.
Company Name	The company the contact belongs to.
Mobile Phone	The contact's mobile number.
Business Phone	The contact's business number.
Street Address	The street part of the contact's address.
City	The city for the contact.
State	The state or province for the contact.
Postal Code	The postal code for the contact.
Website	A web address to record against the contact.
Mail Tip	A short message Outlook shows to anyone composing mail to this contact, for example a note that the address is monitored only during office hours.

Create Contact submits the form. Once a contact has been created the button changes to Create Another and the form clears, so several contacts can be added in one sitting.

Deploy Contact Template

Opens a drawer that creates mail contacts from one or more saved templates across one or more tenants. The same drawer is available from Contact Templates.

Field	Description
Select Tenants	The tenants the contacts are created in. More than one can be chosen, and the tenant you are currently on is preselected. Required.
Select a template	The templates to deploy. More than one can be chosen, and every selected template is created in every selected tenant. Required.

Deploy Templates submits the form. Once a deployment has run the button changes to Deploy Another and the selections clear, so a second batch can be sent without reopening the drawer.

If a mail contact with the same external email address already exists in a tenant, the template is skipped for that tenant and the results panel says so, so re-running a deployment does not create duplicates.

A contact that already exists is skipped, not updated. Changing a template and deploying it again does not correct contacts that were created from the earlier version.

Table Details

The properties returned are for the Exchange Online PowerShell command Get-Contact. For more information on the command please see the Microsoft documentation.

Table Actions

Action	Description	Bulk Action Available
Edit Contact	Opens Edit Contact for the selected contact. Greyed out on a contact that is directory synced, which has to be changed at the source instead.
Set Source of Authority	Switches the contact between Cloud Managed and On-Premises Managed, so you can take over a synced contact in the cloud or hand it back to on-premises. The current setting is preselected, and handing a contact back does not show until the next directory sync cycle. Greyed out on a cloud-only contact, which has no on-premises counterpart to switch between.
Remove Contact	Deletes the mail contact from the tenant. Greyed out on a contact that is directory synced, which has to be removed at the source instead.

---

Feature Requests / Ideas

We value your feedback and ideas. Please raise any feature requests on GitHub.