How to fix email address problem for Jira Cloud account?

[Rusty Koonce]

Background info:  I am organization admin of our Jira cloud instance.  We have about 400 users.  Our email domain recently changed.  Both the @oldemaildomain address and @newemaildomain address are associated with the same Exchange (or O365) account.  Emails can be sent to @oldemaildomain or @newemaildomain addresses and will be delivered to the same Exchange account. 

Since login to Jira Cloud requires email address to login, we need to have users update their email addresses in Jira.  They will do this by logging in as they normally would with the @oldemaildomain address, going to Account Settings > Email, changing the email address there, and clicking Save changes.  This is turn, sends an email to them to confirm the change.  Once they confirm the @newemaildomain address, they start logging in with the new email address to the original existing account.  This process works as expected.

The problem I am seeing is that some users have tried to log in to Jira with their @newemaildomain address, before going into their existing account (with the @oldemaildomain) and updating their email address there.  When they do this, it asks them for their name, has them create a password, and sends a request to me to approve or deny them access to our Jira Cloud site.  It creates a separate Atlassian account with the @newemailaddress domain.  We don’t want them to have 2 accounts due to licenses and other reasons.

So now if the user logs in to their original Jira account (@oldemaildomain address) and tries to update their email address thru Account settings > Email to the @newemailaddress, they click Save changes.  This sends 2 emails to them.  The first is sent to the @oldemaildomain address and notifies that there has been a request to change the email for their @oldemaildomain jira account to the @newemaildomain address.  The second email is sent to the @newemaildomain address, which says “Sorry we couldn’t change your email” because the email address is already associated with another account.

So, I would think that the user would need to log in to their 2nd Alassian account (@newemaildomain address), then delete the account so that the email address would no longer be associated with the second account.  Then I would think that they could log in to the existing account (@oldemaildomain), then update the email address successfully; however, any time the user tried to log in the Jira with the new email address, it says they have already requested access to the site.  They can go no further, like for example, to delete the account.  Nothing is clickable.  No buttons, no links.  Nothing. 

So there is an still an active request for the newly created account (@newemaildomain address) to join our Jira instance.  The request can be approved, denied. or reviewed then approved or denied.  If the request is approved, I would think the user would have 2 separate accounts that couldn’t be merged, which would cause them issues with Sprint work and affect # of licenses.  So I denied the request for that new account to have access to our Jira site, thinking that the user should then be able to log in to the newly created account (@newemaildomain address) and delete the account; however, when they log in, it still says they have already requested access to the site, and they can go no further to delete the account.

Then if I try to go into User Management, and try to suggest a change to the email address from @oldemaildomain to @newemaildomain, I get an error that says “Something went wrong.”

I cannot claim our domain because it is a large government agency that has several instances of Jira Cloud.  We can’t manage, or have Jira admins of other Jira Cloud instances within our large organization manage all of the user accounts with our email domains (1000’s of users). 

I cannot delete the @newemaildomain account because it is not managed by my organization or associated with our Jira instance. 

The user can’t log into the @newemaildomain Atlassian account and delete the account, because it just says he has already request access to the site and can’t do anything else. 

So I’m currently stuck with what to do to get the @newdomainemail address working to log in to the user’s existing account that was created with the @oldemaildomain email address/login id.

I’m thinking that the only thing I can hope for is that after waiting for a couple hours, or a day or so, maybe the user can log into the @newemaildomain account and delete it, without being stuck with “you have already requested access to this site” screen that gives no options to manage the account or do anything else.

Any suggestions that I am unaware of???

Please advise…

[bduncan]

Facing the same but different issue with two authentication sources - because internal users have created customer accounts in Jira Service Desk.

There are several "merge user" feature requests but no traction. For on premise implementations there is a documented work around hacking the database directly - but for cloud instances looks like we're going to be stuck doing the one by one. Which is increasingly tedious once that second account for the user has created any issues.

You could deny account creation - at least for some transition period, that would at least push the burden on to the end users as a one time pain?