Microsoft shared that the email address validation for columns will be deprecated as of the 31st of July 2025. This feature is still in preview as of today, and based on what I found, this was introduced in Q3 or Q4 of 2023 and has been in preview since then. The smart email address validation would work for:
- Only works for model-driven apps
- It acts as a notification and does not block the user
- Text columns with the Format Type = Email
The checks that are part of this smart email address validation are as follows, and this is directly coming from the Microsoft website (link here):
- Incorrect syntax: For example, an address that doesn’t contain both a username and an email domain.
- Disposable domain: An address that contains a known disposable or temporary email domain.
- Test or spam email addresses. An address that contains known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code of the email, and email content and formatting.
- Expired email addresses: This is an email account that has expired and can no longer receive or send email.
- Emails that bounce back: This is an address that can’t receive a message for any reason other than being expired.
Personally speaking, I do not have much experience myself to determine if this feature was a good or bad thing to have. If you do have more experience with this or have a better understanding of why it is a good or bad thing that this is going to be deprecated, then feel free to drop a comment.
Enable/Disable smart email address validation for columns
In order to enable or disable the setting for email address validation for columns, you need to:
- Open the Power Platform Admin Center
- Navigate to Environments
- Select the environment where you want to enable this for
- Select Settings
- Navigate to the Data Validation section
- Enable/Disable the Enable email address validation in model-driven apps (preview)
On the model-driven app level, you can enable/disable this as well by:
- Open the model-driven app
- Select Settings
- Navigate to the Upcoming section
- Enable/Disable the Enable Smart Email Address Validation Control
This is such a shame, I love this little feature and would have been great if they could improve it rather than getting rid of it. It was a little buggy, and I noticed several times where it looked like the email field was empty when I knew it wasn’t. You needed to refresh the screen to get it to show again which could cause users to either miss information or type in to it by mistake, typing over something that was already on the record.