How do I resolve duplicate users with the same email address in Jira?

[ingfri2019]

In our Jira (server) there are several cases of 2 users pr. email address, and the cloud migration assistant does not allow that when I run it. In most cases one user is active and the other inactive.  I think in the past if someone's user was deactivated, instead of reactivating it, the user admin tended to create a new user for that person. Is there a way to resolve this? I've found that deleting an inactive user or any user for that matter is not an easy task because of existing associations to Jira issues the user has, either as a reporter or an asignee. An even bigger problem are all comments the user has made in various Jira issues. By editing the permissions in the permission scheme for a particular project, I have managed to give myself permission to delete, move and edit Jira issues and delete comments. I manage to deal with the Jira issues, but don't know how to track down all the comments in order to delete them.

[Prince Nyeche · Accepted solution]

Hi @ingfri2019 

Welcome to community, the way to go about this is to first know how many duplicate user exist on the instance with the same email address on your Server. you can do this by running an SQL query to count users who's email address is greater than 1. Secondly get a list of those duplicate users and rename one of them via REST API. I wouldn't recommend doing the rename via the DB. That way you could easily use the Migration assistant without conflict.