Contact Groups created from Outlook contacts get added with /o=ExchangeLabs

Last Updated: September 23, 2025

ISSUE

When you create a Contact Group and add members from your Outlook contacts folder, the contacts appear in the group dialog box with an Exchange LegacyDN.

The Email column will show: /o=ExchangeLabs/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=7a46a2941e094e23bf490eae3fe99523-xxxxxxxx-xx

contact group exchange issue

This problem happens with Outlook contacts that were added from the Global Address List. For example, on an email when you right click a recipient’s email address and select Add to Outlook contacts, this saves from the Global Address List. For contacts added to the Outlook contacts folder from the Global Address List, PeopleGraph modifies the contact's Email1OriginalEntryID which breaks the property and causes the issue.

If you try to send an email to a Contact Group with this issue you might get the error below:

“An internal support function returned an error.”

Example error contact group exchange

STATUS: FIXED

The service team addressed the issue with a fix in the service. The fix will prevent future occurrences of the issue. However, the fix does not fix broken local contacts or broken contact groups. The following are some suggested steps to clean the items up. You may approach this differently but make sure you consider you must fix the local contact before you can add it to a contact group.

To clean up the broken local contacts do the following:

Delete the broken local contact in your Outlook contacts.
Save the contact from the GAL back to your local contacts. You can use the Address Book to open the Global Address List, search for the contact, then right click and select Add to Contacts.

To clean up the broken contact group do the following:

Open the contact group and add the fixed local contact back to the group.
Optionally you can add back the fixed contacts while temporarily leaving the broken contact entry, so you know you added back all the contacts. Once you have all the fixed contacts added back you can remove the broken contacts that have the /o=ExchangeLabs.

WORKAROUND

To work around the issue, add members to the Contact Group from the Global Address List directly. You can add from the Offline Global Address list or the Global Address List (example below). Do not add the contacts from your local Contacts folder because those contacts have the bad property.

Offline global address list example