Email addresses for deleted users are still "taken": bug?

I think there’s a bug here, but I suspect opinions will vary…

After I delete a user, Contentful retains a record of that user. (Proof: invite the user again, and notice that Contentful resurrects that user’s name.) My guess is that the record is retained so it can be associated with entries, assets, content models, etc touched by that user. This is sensible, and not a bug.

It turns out that a deleted user’s email address is still considered “taken” by Contentful, and can’t be claimed by another user. (Proof: in Contentful’s User Settings page, try to change your email address to that of a deleted user. Contentful says “has already been taken”.) This feels a bit icky.

You can resurrect a deleted user by inviting them again, so the email address is not forever burned up. However, I’ve hit a scenario that I suspect others might also encounter: because I previously invited myself using email addresses ABC and XYZ for testing, there’s no way to change the email address in my “main” Contentful account (the one that’s created entries, etc) from ABC to XYZ.

How to reproduce:

  1. Sign up to Contentful as user 1 with email address ABC.
  2. Invite yourself with email address XYZ as user 2 (reason: to test user roles, for example).
  3. Delete user 2.
  4. Try and fail to change user 1’s email address from ABC to XYZ.

It’s not the biggest bug in the world, I admit. It hit me because I signed up to Contentful originally with a personal email address for evaluation, made entries, assets, etc, and then invited myself using a corporate email address for role testing. Now there’s no way to tie those entries, assets, etc, to the corporate email address.

Hope that makes sense!

Not a solution to the problem by any stretch but if XYZ is using G Suite you can simply add +something to the name portion of the email address and it will still be delivered to XYZ.

For example if XYZ@acme.com is the main email address you could use XYZ+contentful@acme.com as the Contentful email address…

I don’t know if other major email services have similar functionality…

Adding up to this, depending on how you see it, what you described can be regarded as a feature, rather than a bug itself.

But I understand how this might be a frustrating experience and I already made our engineering team aware of it. :slight_smile: