Forum Discussion
Office365 OneDrive Share - Link cant be sent to external email address
I am having the identical issue when attempting to share a OneDrive folder to a specific external email address. All permissions are properly setup to permit external sharing with users who accept the invitation and are able to authenticate their email on the MS side.
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.
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
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.
- Thank you, your post helped me to solve my error.
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.
Adding StephenRice...
- StephenRice
Microsoft
Hi all,
Thanks for flagging me, this is definitely unexpected. A few thoughts:
1) It looks like the e-mail address is unresolved. If you click out of the text box, does it auto resolve to the e-mail address?
2) If you look at the user in the directory who was resolved in the second screenshot, is the e-mail address you're sharing with linked in any way?
If none of the above, is someone able to get a Fiddler trace and send it to me? We haven't been able to repro this on our end. Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
We are now using OneDrive for Business. One of our external course writers has both a gmail and a hotmail address. We first sent him a link to the folders in our OneDrive he needed access to. But his personal OneDrive 365 uses the hotmail address. We want to send the link to our OneDrive folders to his hotmail address, so he can set it up so that he can sync to our OneDrive off of his windows explorer folders. But when I try sending a sharing link to his hotmail address I get the "link can't be shared" error message. And OneDrive just keeps bringing up as an option the gmail address.
How can I totally delete his gmail address from our OneDrive directory/memory so I can then create and send him a sharable link to his hotmail address?
Olgy Gary, Lead Instructional Designer
ORU
Peter Lundstedt I had the same issue, but then realized I need to go into each Shared Library and set the permission to allow anyone with a link. Hope that helps.
