Microsoft Graph List Contacts API returns contacts beyond what are visible in the Outlook UI

Question

Outlook UI

You can see that I've made three test contacts in the UI accessible here: https://outlook.live.com/people/

Microsoft Graph List Contacts API

When I call the List Contacts API ( https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/contacts?$orderby=createdDateTime desc&$top=50 ), I get a list of contacts that is much more extensive than the list visible in the UI. These contacts appear to be anyone that has emailed me or anyone that I've emailed.

The problem

If I want to poll against the GET /me/contacts endpoint to get some data whenever I make a new contact, I'll end up getting notified every time someone new sends me an email or every time I send someone new an email (even if I didn't manually create the contact).

Is this intentional? If so, are there any filters I could add to specify that I don't want to get contacts that were not manually created by me? Looking over the JSON representation of a contact , I don't see anything I can filter on.

Possible Solution

My only thought is that I notice that the contacts made for me exist in a folder that is not returned in the contactFolders API endpoint. I could theoretically make a call to that endpoint and take the list of contacts returned and check if the parentFolderId exists in there. If it does, presumably that's because we created a contact and if not then it's made for us. That feels terribly hacky, though.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

This is an issue with the Microsoft Graph Beta APIs. Switching to the v1.0 of the Graph REST APIs resolved this.

Answer 2

It seems Outlook automatically adds every email address that had been in contact with the user as a hidden contact in a hidden folder.

The GET beta/me/contacts endpoint (unlike the v1.0 one) returns all contacts from all folders, so it also includes this hidden folder.

There are two ways to get the expected list of contacts:

Option 1 - get all contacts, and then filter:

1. GET /beta/me/contactFolders to obtain a list of "real" folders (this endpoint does not return that hidden folder)
2. GET /beta/me/contacts to get all contacts in the account
3. Filter the list of contacts by field parentFolderId - to keep only contacts in one of the folders returned at step 1

Option 2 - get contacts by folder:

1. GET /beta/me/contactFolders to obtain a list of "real" folders (this endpoint does not return that hidden folder)
2. for each folder returned call GET /beta/me/contactFolders/{folder-id}/contacts and aggregate the returned contact lists

Hope this helps.