Forum Discussion
Shane Kelm
Jul 05, 2017Copper Contributor
Office365 OneDrive Share - Link cant be sent to external email address
Within Office365 > OneDrive. On Mac and windows (both chrome), users are starting to notice that when an external contact is entered which has been used many times before without issue, is now getti...
Peter Lundstedt
Dec 12, 2017Copper Contributor
I'm having the same issue - External sharing is set to "Most permissive" in the OneDrive admin center but users can only specify internal email addresses when sharing files and folders. Attempting to share with an external user produces "The link can't be sent because at least one recipient isn't valid".
Looking at existing Microsoft documentation such as this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-sharing-in-OneDrive-and-SharePoint-ee8b91c5-05ec-44c2-9796-78fa27ec8425?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US seems to imply that this is not expected behavior.
Matt Raketti
Dec 12, 2017Copper Contributor
My problem was solved after troubleshooting several items with MS support. The cause of the issue in my case was that the external email address that I was trying to share to was listed as my secondary email address for account recovery. Changing my secondary email address solved the issue for me. If that doesn't work for you, the problem may still be that the email you are trying to share to is registered in your instance of onedrive/sharepoint and you may end up having to take steps to remove it manually through powershell (which was what I almost had to do). Unfortunately I do not have the instructions on fixing via powershell, but you could try googling it as I think they are available somewhere. Otherwise call the support team.
Best,
MVR
- Brian_Klish_workMay 26, 2020Copper Contributor
Matt Raketti That seems to be the problem for me too on 5/26/2020. Amazing they haven't addressed this yet. If I specify a different external email address then it works just fine. It just doesn't allow you to use an address that is someone's recovery email. Worst part is you won't know that's the case. I don't know of any way to search for recovery email accounts to validate that.
- Aleksandrs ZariņšAug 07, 2018Copper ContributorThank you, your post helped me to solve my error.
- Peter LundstedtFeb 09, 2018Copper Contributor
I think this is what ended up being the source of my issue. I had one particular non-domain email address that I was testing this with, and without realizing it, that address was setup as my secondary/recovery address. I just tested this using someone else's personal email address and I was able to share the file successfully.