Why the email address could not be recognized by VSTS when assign work items?

Question

I tried set the email address for assign to field for work item manually.

Then an error displayed as "The identity value 'xxx@xxx.com' for field 'Assigned To' is an unknown identity." This could be resolved by clicking search the user. Then the email address will be recognized.

Why the work item doesn't recognize the email address?

And how to assign the work item to user by email via coding?

Answer 1

To trouble shooting the issue, you can check with below aspects:

1. Check if the user has been added to the VSTS account

   In the Users Tab https://account.visualstudio.com/_admin/_users, make sure the user (xxx@xxx.com) has been added.

2. Check if the user and your VSTS in different AAD

   It’s mainly caused by the user (xxx@xxx.com) is backed to another AAD, so the VSTS account and the user (xxx@xxx.com) are in different AAD.

   To double check if it’s caused by AAD, you can ask the user (xxx@xxx.com) to login your VSTS account . If it shows 401 error, that means the user (xxx@xxx.com) is backed to a different AAD. To solve the issue, you can use any of below options:

   • Option 1: ask the user to use a microsoft email address (such as xxx@outlook.com or xxx@hotmail.com etc).
   • Option 2: add the VSTS accoutn to the same AAD as the user xxx@xxx.com. You can refer the article Connect VSTS account to Azure Active Directory.

You can also refer the related post here.