How can we restrict *archived*/*delisted* email addresses being returned from the /peoples endpoint

Daniel 0 Reputation points
2026-08-03T14:09:37.3933333+00:00

Calling the people API (GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/people/) is returning email addresses that shouldn't be shown, such as archived / delisted addresses.

I imagine there must be some kind of flag, as they're not displayed in Outlook, but, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way of restricting these.

These addresses do have a relevance score of 0 when returned, but for the most part this score seems to be undocumented. I don't really know what this score means, except that a larger number means that a user is more likely to use this email address.

My question, are we safe to rely on this? Is it okay to filter out all results with a score of zero or less? And are we confident that this won't hide real but just less likely to be chosen results?

Moved from: Microsoft Security | Microsoft Graph

Microsoft 365 and Office | Development | Other
0 comments

1 answer

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Teddie Dang 175 Reputation points
    2026-08-04T01:42:39.7533333+00:00

    Hi @Daniel

    Based on the current Microsoft Graph documentation, there isn't a supported way to exclude archived or delisted email addresses returned by the /me/people endpoint.

    The /me/people API is designed to return people who are most relevant to the signed-in user, rather than serving as an authoritative directory of active email addresses. Similarly, the scoredEmailAddress resource defines relevanceScore only as the relevance score of the email address. The documentation doesn't state that the score reflects whether an address is active, archived, or should be hidden, nor does it define any threshold (such as 0) that can safely be used for filtering.

    For that reason, I wouldn't recommend relying on relevanceScore <= 0 to exclude addresses. While those addresses may appear less relevant, there's no documented guarantee that a score of 0 means the address is obsolete. Filtering on that basis could potentially exclude valid but infrequently used addresses.

    If Outlook is suppressing certain addresses while the People API still returns them, I couldn't find any documented property or filter that reproduces Outlook's behavior. If matching Outlook's behavior is a requirement, I'd recommend opening a Microsoft support case or submitting feedback, as this appears to be an undocumented behavior of the People API.

    References:

    I hope this information is helpful.

    If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment". 

    Note: Please follow the steps in the forum documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread. 

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments

Your answer

Answers can be marked as 'Accepted' by the question author and 'Recommended' by moderators, which helps users know the answer solved the author's problem.