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Find all the Distribution Groups a user is a member of with PowerShell in Office 365

6 Comments

Whether you want to do some reports or debugging, you might need to quickly find out what Distribution Groups a user is a member of! You could go in the user’s profile, see all of the groups , find out which ones are Security, which ones are Distribution Groups.. or you could do an easy PowerShell cmdlet!

Find all the Distribution Groups a user is a member of with PowerShell

Since we will be playing with Exchange Online, you first need to connect to Exchange!

$cred = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

Next up, I will save the Username of the person I am looking for in a variable called Username

$Username = "Jeff.Collins@globomantics.org"

And then, I will use this cmdlet which will get all the Distribution Groups in my tenant, and then find the ones where my username is in the members! (This assumes your e-mail address is the same as the username! If that’s not the case, you can simply put the e-mail in the UserName variable and it will work!)

$DistributionGroups= Get-DistributionGroup | where { (Get-DistributionGroupMember $_.Name | foreach {$_.PrimarySmtpAddress}) -contains "$Username"}

You can now either Display it , or do another action such as removing the user from all of them!

Find all the Distribution Groups a user is a member of with PowerShell in Office 365

That’s it! As you see this is really an quick and easy PowerShell snippet!

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Find all the Office 365 Groups a user is a Member of with PowerShell

6 Comments

  • January 10, 2019 at 7:59 am
    Andy

    Hi Vlad , have you ever encountered “The operation couldn’t be performed because ” matches multiple entries.”?

    I’m only getting it for a few entries.

    Thanks,
    Andy

    Reply
  • February 4, 2019 at 12:05 pm

    You get this error when running which cmdlet? I will try to replicate!

    Reply
  • March 13, 2019 at 10:34 am
    Tim

    I ran into the same problem but traced it down to groups having the same name. For instance we have a group called Interns which is a Distribution List. I would get the error Andy did, upon further research there was another group called Interns only this one was an O365 group not a distribution list. The second group RecipientTypeDetails was GroupMailbox instead of MailUniversalDistributionGroup. My workaround was to specify the RecipientTypeDetails
    get-distributiongroup $GroupName -recipientTypeDetails MailUniversalDistributionGroup

    Reply
  • April 10, 2020 at 2:24 pm
    Deb Codding

    Thanks for sharing this. Just made my life a lot easier!

    Reply
  • August 21, 2020 at 6:07 am
    fp

    this excellent script saves precious time

    Reply
  • January 30, 2022 at 10:31 am
    zac

    decent method – however you should change your input to either be UPN or use the input of their primary smtp address to lookup their upn. Then when you do the search, instead of matching on primarysmtpaddress, do a match on their upn.

    It’s quite common, especially in large orgs where the upn doesn’t match the users primarysmtpaddresss.

    Reply

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