Data integrity issue: People Picker Occasionally Fails to Return Email Address

[supermarkd]

Summary

We’re observing inconsistent behavior in the People Picker:
The email address of selected users is sometimes missing from the returned user object.

This behavior is not consistent — sometimes the email is present, other times it is not.
In many cases, reopening the People Picker causes the email to appear for the same user.

Reproduction Steps

1. Open the People Picker and select a user.
2. Inspect the returned user object → the email field is sometimes missing.
3. Close the People Picker.
4. Reopen it and select the same user again → the email field may now be present.

See screenshots below:

Impact

This causes unreliable behavior in apps that depend on the email field (e.g. for identity, messaging, or lookups).

Developers may assume that email is always returned and write logic accordingly — this leads to breakages or silent failures.

The issue undermines the reliability and consistency of the People Picker component.

Expected Behavior
The People Picker should always return the email address of the selected user if available.

There should be no need to reopen the picker to get complete data.

Urgency

This is a core data integrity issue:
Email addresses are commonly required for identity and communication-related logic.
Inconsistent behavior here leads to user confusion and broken functionality in production apps.

🔧 Please investigate and resolve this as a priority.

[sayali-MSFT]

@supermarkd , Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. We will check and update you soon.

[sebiJo]

We were also able to reproduce this on Teams client Mac. Quit and relaunch Microsoft Teams client, then go straight to a People Picker and observe that it provides empty e-mail addresses at first try. When the People Picker is opened a second time, the e-mail addresses are provided correctly.
This causes major follow-up errors in the apps, due to inconsistent data.

[sayali-MSFT]

@supermarkd, Thank you for your report! We’re currently unable to reproduce the issue you’re experiencing.

Could you please confirm whether this issue occurs only on macOS, or have you also tried it on Windows?

Additionally, we are attempting to reproduce the issue using the following manifest. Could you please try it on your end as well and let us know if the issue persists?

Tab-People-Picker.zip

[supermarkd]

Hi Team, I was able to re-produce the issue on web, Windows and Mac. The problem occurs independent of the used platform when initiating the People Picker for the first time after loading the app. People are found (as indicated in your screenshot) but the problem is that you don't get the whole context such as email delivered. To reproduce this, you have to actually pick a person and see that the email is not appearing below the name. Please try it.
When you open the People picker the second time, it usually works. Please also see the comment from @sebiJo

[jker-org]

@sayali-MSFT : We have the same issue on Windows.

OS: Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64
Client: desktop\TeamsModern

Package.json:
"@microsoft/teams-js": "^2.34.0",

[sayali-MSFT]

@everyone,Thank you for your patience! We have reported this as a bug for further investigation.

We will keep you updated as soon as we receive further information. Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

If possible, could you kindly share a short video as well, so we can pass it along to our engineering team?