Last Updated on December 3, 2021 by rudyooms
This blog will be about a weird issue we encountered when we were trying to remove an email alias. :
“An azure active directory call was made to keep object in sync between azure active directory and exchange online”
Sometimes an easy question can result in taking away much of your time. A customer asked us a simple question: Could you remove an email alias and create a shared mailbox with this email address?
So you have got 2 options here.
1. The GUI
So to start with the nice GUI option we all know, I opened the exchange online admin center to remove the alias. To do so I selected the alias which I wanted to remove and pressed the remove button.
As shown above, a nice error occurred:
“An azure active directory call was made to keep object in sync between azure active directory and exchange online” ???
That’s one error I haven’t seen for a long time. This is a cloud-only tenant, no azure ad connect, nothing.
2. PowerShell
So we go for option 2: PowerShell. So I fired up my PowerShell session to Exchange Online and run the set-mailbox command
Set-Mailbox MailboxName -EmailAddresses @{Remove=’alias@somedomain.com’
But again… the same error.
I remember this blog post from a year ago about this error, but this was not the issue
They say Google is your best friend but google did not find any good solution? Maybe create a Microsoft support ticket? I guessed that definitely would take some time before they responded because it’s not a critical problem.
But then a thought hits me, why not remove all aliases? (please note all aliases before running this command, so you can restore them later on)
Set-mailbox *Username* -emailaddresses SMTP:*Emailaddress*
And they are gone!!!
Conclusion:
Sell me this solution, because sometimes a simple question can take up much of your time. Troubleshooting why it’s not working can be really fun, especially when you come up with a solution.
