Can I retrieve the email address I used to register a JIRA user account using a legacy username?

[mikejoseph]

After a bit of searching, I've still been unable to find a solution to this issue.

I have 2 Bitbucket accounts. One of which is my own personal Bitbucket account, which I use regularly. I'm a software developer and I created a second Bitbucket account on my client's behalf in order to manage any software projects that are related to them. I then granted my personal account access to their repos and up until now I've had all the access I need.

I've been tasked with changing the password for my client's Bitbucket account due to a recent LastPass security incident and I can't log in to change it! I used to login using a username (not email address) and password. However, Bitbucket's login screen is now prompting for an email address and no longer accepts my username as part of the login inputs.

The problem: I forgot the email address I used to create the account and I can't find a way to retrieve it. Therefore, I can't login to the account even though I have a username and password.

Is there a way of retrieving or resetting the email address associated with a legacy bitbucket username?

[mikejoseph · Accepted solution]

Hi Theodora,

I have no idea what email address would have been used to register this account. This client of mine had several domains and email aliases pointing every which way, so it could be any number of combinations. Is there a way of sending a forgot password / password reset request to the email address using the bitbucket username as input (even if it's something only Atlassian support staff can invoke)?

Thanks again,
Mike

[Theodora Boudale]

Hi Mike,

I can see in our system the Bitbucket Cloud account that has the same email as your community account. I can also see that this account of yours has access to repositories of a workspace of another account.

I assume this is the one you are looking to reset the password of, so I initiated a password reset request for the email of this other account. However, I checked our email logs and we get a hard bounce response from the recipient's mail server, with the message

The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.

Considering that, I would suggest creating a new workspace, transferring all repositories to that new workspace, and then setting up user access to the repos in the new workspace:

• https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/transfer-repository-ownership/

If you proceed with that, all users with access to these repos will need to update their local clones' remote URLs to match the new remote. Details are provided in the section "Update local configuration files with the new repository URL" of the last link I shared. If you have integrated your repos with any third-party tools, then you will probably need to make changes to these tools as well to point to the new repo URLs.

This will require some planning and work, but it may be better than continuing to use repos from a personal workspace whose user cannot be accessed.

Kind regards,
Theodora

[Theodora Boudale]

Hi @mikejoseph,

Login to the website from a browser is only possible with an email address, username login to the website has been disabled for a few years now. An account's password can be reset via https://id.atlassian.com/login/resetpassword, but this form only accepts email as well.

There is an API endpoint that returns the email address of the authenticated user:

• https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/rest/api-group-users/#api-user-emails-email-get

However, basic authentication for API calls requires a username and an app password (account password usage for API calls has been deprecated). If you have an app password for this account with at least Account: Email permissions, you can retrieve the email this way.

Otherwise, since you know the account's password, you can try logging in to https://bitbucket.org/ with all the email addresses you own, and see if one of them logs you into the account you want.

Kind regards,
Theodora