Quick Tips #4: Exchange 2013 Error – Username isn’t a group or an individual recipient.

In Exchange 2013 Admin Center, I was attempting to add a new user to the Delivery Management of an “All Users” Dynamic Distribution Group, but I got the following error when clicking save:

[username] isn't a group or an individual recipient. Remove it to continue.

The username in question was a very old and disabled account, so I removed it from the Delivery Management list and clicked Save. But again the same message. But I removed her and she’s no longer in the list! The only option is to cancel, with the new user not added to Delivery Management.

At first I thought the problem was some complicated corruption of the database, and went looking for PowerShell commands to verify the information in the GUI, but actually it was a lot more simple than that, though a bit hidden…

There’s another section of the Dynamic Distribution Group window, “message approval”:

Here, a previous admin had enabled the option for these mails to require approval first, but with a number of users who “don’t require message approval”:

In this list was the user throwing up the error message. You would think that by removing the user from Delivery Management they would also be removed from Message Approval, as one is pointless without the other, but that’s not the case. Removing the user from here finally allowed me to save the window with the new user added.

So…to avoid frustration, check both Delivery Management and Message Approval when removing users from Dynamic Distribution Groups!