Forum Discussion
Teams Gains Ability to Start Chat with Email Address
A new Teams feature allows users to initiate chats with any email address. This caused some commotion in the security community, but it’s not that bad. In fact, it’s an extension of existing functionality that allows Teams users to chat with guest accounts. All that’s happening is that initiating a chat causes a new guest account to be created in the tenant, and there’s lots of controls to make sure that guests are controlled.
https://office365itpros.com/2025/11/10/chat-with-email-address-teams/
2 Replies
All guest controls apply, including if a guest can join a team. This feature accelerates adding guests to tenants, but no more so than adding guests to share a document.
Thanks for your explanation, Tony. I've spent about 5 hours trying to determine if this new feature added them as Guests in the tenant or some other one-off access that would be difficult to monitor. Our concern is that the invitee may have gained access to files or Loop content that may be previously shared or referenced in a Channel Chat. In essence, from your description, all this does is shorten the method of Inviting a Guest via the previous workflow. All the previous content could be searched and accessed as Guests add via the old method could.
I assume if we have Guest access for a Team Blocked, those controls would be maintained.
