Suspended & removed user is pulled again by Jira if I assign same ID to the new user

Question

Our old employee has resigned, we suspended his account and removed him from our instance.

Now, our IT team assigned a new employee the same email ID that the old employee had.

That Jira is suspended & removed.

When I add new user with old email id, Jira pulls the same old account of old employee.

What can I do in this scenario?

It happened once before, we provided a new unique ID to the new employee, but what is the permanent solution for this?

Thank you

Tomislav Tobijas · Answer

As per official docs:

You’ll have a 14-day grace period following the deletion request, during which the account will appear as temporarily deactivated.

So, email should be okay to reuse 14 days after you have 'started the deletion process'.

You might want to confirm that with the Atlassian Support team just to be sure.

Cheers,
Tom

Aleena Umaiir · Answer

Hi,

This would mean that, after some time, the email address that was linked to the deleted account will be 'free'

As per your this statement, after exactly how many days this email ID will be free to use ?

Tomislav Tobijas · Answer

Hi @Aleena Umaiir ,

UUIDs for Atlassian Accounts are in fact email addresses. With that being said, the same user cannot have two different accounts linked to the same email.

From what you've described - you've suspended and removed an old employee account from your site/organization, that would imply that this user wasn't under your managed accounts?

By just removing the account from a site, you're only removing it from the user directory and not deleting the account and all the data that is linked to that account.

If you would really like to 'reassign' the same email to a new user (meaning you want to have a clean start and no data linked to it), this user account needs to be deleted. In case your organization is the owner of the account (so it's under your managed accounts), Org admin or User access admin can delete this account permanently. This would mean that, after some time, the email address that was linked to the deleted account will be 'free' and by sending the invitation to that particular email address, a new Atlassian Account would be created.
*In case we are not talking about managed accounts, the user needs to delete their account themselves.

However, that might not be the best practice as all data that was performed by the previous user is 'unlinked' from the creator. Meaning, for example, wherever an old user left a comment, you would have 'Former user' displayed instead.
That's why, usually, organizations just deactivate accounts instead of deleting them, but from the Atlassian aspect, that would mean that each new employee would need to have a unique email address that will be linked to their account (not a 'reused one').

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Tom