Microsoft Graph People and Contacts API

# Fix list: Microsoft Graph People and Contacts API

From Anchor Terminal's listing at https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/microsoft-graph-people, the October 2026 research run, assessed 14 October 2026. Grade B, 64.6 out of 100.

This is everything the published grade says the listing lacks, the biggest possible gain to the total first. It comes from the reason given for each score, the checklist each category was scored against (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist), the provenance checks, the deductions, what we couldn't check and what the review panel asked for. A fix counts at the next check, once it's public.

For a coding agent working on Microsoft Graph People and Contacts API: work through the items below in the product, its docs and its public pages. Each category gives the reason for its score, with the points each checklist item earned, and the checklist itself, so the gap is the items that earned less than their points. Change the product, not the wording, and keep a note of what you changed and where it's published.

## 1. Payments & pricing, 35 out of 100, up to 8.1 more on the total

Why it scored 35: No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Contacts and people endpoints aren't metered and Microsoft 365 plan prices are public, but work accounts need a licensed mailbox (15). Personal Microsoft accounts work with delegated permissions at no cost and no card (20). A person registers an app in Entra and, for application or People.Read.All permissions, an admin consents (0).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-payments):

The published rubric, also on the [x402 page](https://www.anchorterminal.com/x402/).

- 40, a machine payment protocol (x402, MPP or L402) on the tool's own endpoints. 10 to 30 when it covers only some endpoints or only goes through a third party, and the note says which.
- 20, per-call or per-unit pricing published without a login. 10 for public plan-only pricing, 0 for "contact sales" or prices behind a login.
- 20, a free tier or trial that doesn't need a card.
- 20, autonomous onboarding, meaning an agent can get access without a person signing up in a browser (keyless use, x402, a programmatic key API).

Payment platforms and agent wallets rarely charge for their own API over a machine protocol, so the first line has steps for them, and the highest one that applies counts. 40 when x402, MPP or L402 runs on all their own endpoints, 30 when it runs on part of their own API, 25 when their merchants can accept one, 20 for running a facilitator, 15 for paying as a buyer, and 0 when the only protocol is their own. Merchant acceptance sits above a facilitator because the platform's own customers can charge agents through it, while a facilitator settles for sellers who wire up the protocol themselves. The counter-argument (a facilitator does more for the protocol as a whole) has a point. Each note says which step applied.

Open-source software you run yourself is scored on its hosted or paid option if it has one. A free, self-hosted package with nothing to buy gets 20, 20 and 20 for the last three lines, and 0 to 40 for the first only if it ships a payment protocol.

## 2. Reliability, 60 out of 100, up to 8 more on the total

Why it scored 60: Graded on the v1.0 REST API, as the microsoft-graph-calendar and outlook-mail-graph listings were. A public Microsoft service health page at status.cloud.microsoft (20). It renders only with JavaScript, so components and history weren't readable (5). Contacts fall under the Outlook limits of 10,000 requests per 10 minutes and four concurrent requests per app and mailbox (15). 429 responses carry Retry-After with backoff guidance, but contact creation has no transactionId or other idempotency key, so a retried create can duplicate (10 of 15). No SLA covering the Graph API found (0). Contacts and people endpoints are generally available on v1.0 (10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-reliability):

Hosted APIs, MCP servers, models and platforms.

- 20, a public status page with component history (Statuspage, Instatus, BetterStack or the vendor's own).
- 0 to 30, the incident record for the last 90 days on that page. 30 for a clean record or trivial incidents only, 20 for minor incidents only, 10 for one major outage (an hour or more of a core API down, or errors across the board), 0 for several. 5 when there's no history we could read, and the note says so.
- 15, rate limits documented with numbers.
- 15, documented 429 or overload handling (Retry-After, backoff guidance), and idempotency keys or safe-retry guidance where writes are involved.
- 10, an SLA published for any paid tier.
- 10, the surface agents use is generally available, not beta or preview.

Local packages, SDKs, frameworks and stdio MCP servers.

- 20, installs from an official package with supported runtimes stated.
- 25, a public CI and test suite, passing on the default branch.
- 0 to 25, open crash or regression issues relative to activity (25 for few and handled, 0 for many, old and unanswered).
- 15, semver discipline and breaking changes called out in a changelog.
- 15, version 1.0 or later, or declared stable.

Protocols are read from their reference implementations, the public facilitators or servers, spec stability and test vectors.

## 3. Security & auth, 72 out of 100, up to 4.9 more on the total

Why it scored 72: OAuth 2.0 through Entra ID with Contacts.Read, Contacts.ReadWrite, People.Read and People.Read.All (30). Read-only permissions for every read path, admin consent for reading other users' relevant people, and RBAC for Applications to limit application permissions to chosen mailboxes. Nothing asks for confirmation before a delete or permanentDelete (17 of 20). Contact names, notes and people results can carry text written by outsiders, and no injection guidance was found in these docs (5 of 15). Graph activity logs record app, user, IP, URI, status and scopes per request with Entra ID P1 or P2 (12). microsoft.com's security.txt expired on 23 September 2026 and was still expired on 14 October, and a token-leak fix in the JavaScript client sits unreleased with no advisory (8 of 20).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-security):

- 0 to 30, the credential model. 30 for OAuth 2.1 with scopes, or scoped and revocable keys with rotation. 20 for plain revocable API keys. 10 for one all-powerful key. 10 off when a secret can travel in a URL query string as a documented option.
- 0 to 20, read-only or least-privilege modes, and confirmation or approval for destructive actions.
- 0 to 15, prompt-injection posture where the tool returns untrusted content (documented mitigations or guidance). A tool that returns no untrusted content gets 10.
- 0 to 15, audit logs or per-call visibility for the operator.
- 0 to 20, a security programme. security.txt or a disclosure policy, a bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001, advisories handled in public.

Models are read for retention, whether API data trains models (and whether that's off by default), zero-retention options and certifications. Frameworks for telemetry defaults, approval hooks, guardrails and sandboxing.

## 4. Schema & documentation, 83 out of 100, up to 2.8 more on the total

Why it scored 83: OpenAPI for all of Graph v1.0 in microsoftgraph/msgraph-metadata, plus CSDL (25). No llms.txt on learn.microsoft.com (0). Reference pages list least-privileged permissions per account type and state limits such as $search working only for the signed-in user's relevant people and $skip not working with $search (17). Typed properties and enums in the metadata (13). Example requests and responses on every page and the shared Graph error format (13). v1.0 and beta with a dated changelog whose latest personal contacts entry is 12 March 2026 (15).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-schema):

APIs and MCP servers.

- 25, a machine-readable contract (a public OpenAPI file or similar; for MCP, typed JSON Schema inputs on every tool).
- 10, llms.txt or Markdown docs served for agents.
- 0 to 20, descriptions that say what a tool is for, when to use it and when not to, read from the tool definitions in the source or the API reference.
- 0 to 15, typed inputs with enums, constraints and required fields, and no free-form JSON blobs.
- 0 to 15, examples and documented error responses.
- 15, versioning and a public changelog.

Models are read from the API reference, the OpenAPI file, llms.txt, the structured-output and tool-use docs and the model cards. Frameworks from docs a model can follow, typed interfaces, examples and the API reference.

## 5. Agent ergonomics, 83 out of 100, up to 2.8 more on the total

Why it scored 83: $select and $top on both APIs, and odata.maxpagesize on delta (23). @odata.nextLink paging, delta tokens for contact folders, $filter on email addresses, relevance ordering and fuzzy $search on people (20). Graph errors carry a code, message and request ID, and 429s say which throttle scope was hit (17). No idempotency key on contact creates and no MCP tool annotations to check, since the only MCP option is the legacy User server (10 of 20). Official SDKs in .NET, Java, Python, Go and more, with the JavaScript client last published to npm in September 2023 (13).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-ergonomics):

- 0 to 25, context cost. For MCP, the number and size of the tool definitions (25 for ten or fewer compact tools, 15 for 11 to 30, 5 for more than 30, plus up to 10 back for toolsets, dynamic loading or read-only subsets). For APIs, whether responses can be sized (field selection, limits, summaries).
- 20, pagination, filtering and output-size controls.
- 20, actionable, documented error responses, codes and messages an agent can recover from.
- 20, idempotency or safe retries, and for MCP the `readOnlyHint` and `destructiveHint` annotations.
- 15, sensible defaults, few required parameters, and official SDKs in at least two languages.

Models are read for tool use, structured output, prompt caching, context length, batch and SDKs. Frameworks for how much code and how many defaults a tool-calling agent with MCP needs.

## 6. Transparency & trust, 69 out of 100, up to 2.7 more on the total

Made of editorial 52, provenance 85.

Why it scored 69: Closed service under the Microsoft APIs terms of use, with MIT SDKs (15). The Microsoft privacy statement and product terms cover Graph, but we found no retention statement for contacts or people data through the API (15). Dated deprecations in the changelog, such as the sharedInsight list method announced on 14 January 2026 to stop returning data after November 2026 (14 of 20). Microsoft 365 sub-processor and data residency pages exist, which we didn't recheck (8).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-transparency):

- 0 to 30, source availability and licence clarity. 30 for open source under an OSI licence, 15 for closed with clear terms, 0 for unclear terms.
- 0 to 30, data handling and retention statements that agree with each other (privacy policy, DPA, retention periods, subprocessors).
- 0 to 20, a deprecation policy or notices with dates.
- 0 to 20, telemetry disclosed with an opt-out (local software), or subprocessors and data locations disclosed (hosted).

The other half of Transparency and trust is the provenance score, computed from checked facts (below). The category score is the mean of the two.

Provenance checks not met in full (half of this category, computed from checked facts):

- Terms of service: read, states 5 of the 7 things a reader expects, and has 3 clauses that cost points (2.3 of 10)
- Privacy policy: read, states 8 of the 8 things a reader expects, and has 1 clause that costs points (8 of 10)
- security.txt: published but past its Expires date (5 of 10)

## 7. Maintenance & community, 76 out of 100, up to 2.1 more on the total

Why it scored 76: msgraph-sdk-python 1.64.0 on 6 October 2026 (30). Several Python SDK releases in the last 90 days, continuing the series graded on the other Graph listings (20). Public changelog and SDK issue trackers, but the June 2026 security fix still hasn't reached npm (10). Current SDKs in most languages, with the JavaScript client the exception at 3.0.7 from September 2023 (10). Active CI on the metadata and Python repositories, none of it reaching the JavaScript package (6).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-maintenance):

- 0 to 30, time since the last release, or the last published model or API change for a closed service. 30 within 30 days, 20 within 90, 10 within 180, 0 older.
- 20, at least three releases or dated changelog entries in the last 90 days.
- 0 to 25, responsiveness. Issues and pull requests answered on GitHub (the open issues and how recent the replies are). For closed services, a public changelog and a support or community channel that answers, 0 to 15.
- 15, presence in the official MCP registry under a verified namespace (MCP servers), or current official SDKs (APIs and models).
- 10, package health, current dependencies and CI.

Models are read for deprecation notice periods and model churn rather than release counts.

## Deductions

Each comes off the total. A fixed and documented problem counts for less at the next check.

- 2026-06-16: a fix for a token leak through URL userinfo host confusion was merged into msgraph-sdk-javascript and the version bumped to 3.0.8, but on 14 October 2026 npm still serves 3.0.7 from September 2023 and the repository has no published advisory. Exploiting it needs an attacker-influenced URL passed to the client (https://github.com/microsoftgraph/msgraph-sdk-javascript/commit/5438ae90f50ef15d3656f0cf9c5485deee351f19, https://registry.npmjs.org/@microsoft/microsoft-graph-client/latest)

## What we couldn't check

What we couldn't read counted as absent. Publishing it on a page a plain HTTP fetch can read (not only in a browser) lets the next check count it.

- unchecked: status page components and incident history, which need JavaScript
- unchecked: rate limits specific to the people API, which the throttling page doesn't list separately
- Whether Microsoft will publish msgraph-sdk-javascript 3.0.8 or an advisory for the 16 June 2026 fix
- Whether Work IQ in Agent 365 will expose contacts or people tools to replace the legacy User server

## Weaknesses

- No idempotency key on contact creation, so retries can duplicate
- 4 concurrent requests per app per mailbox
- The npm JavaScript client is 3.0.7 from September 2023, without the June 2026 token-leak fix
- The only MCP option, the User server, is kept for backward compatibility
- Status page renders only with JavaScript

## What costs an agent a turn today

The notes we give agents before they call it. Each one is a workaround an agent shouldn't need.

- Use /me/people?$search= for fuzzy lookups and /me/contacts for the saved address book, since they return different sets
- Keep the @odata.deltaLink from the contact delta function and call it on the next run
- Check for an existing contact with $filter on emailAddresses before creating one
- Honour Retry-After on 429 and keep to 4 parallel calls per mailbox
- Ask for Contacts.Read and People.Read unless the task must change contacts

## When it's done

Send what changed and where it's published as a dispute (https://www.anchorterminal.com/builders/#disputes, or `POST https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/contact` with `"kind": "dispute"`). Disputes are answered in public, and the listing is checked again by the same checklist. Paying for an audit or a listing claim changes nothing here.