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Email address change
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Email address change

jtkjtk Member

I thought I would share my experience changing the primary email address with providers. Many contact details can be changed without provider intervention, but often times an email change requires interaction with the support team.

Many providers allow self-service email address changes. As long as you have your client area and portal login, you may be able to change your email address yourself. Easy enough.

Often however, you can change your contact address, but your "owner" address that is associated with the client area login requires a ticket. In almost all cases I've seen a simple ticket request is all that is required to make this change. Although not all providers realize that there is the client area login email address and the contact address, both need to be changed, the former often by the provider.

As a customer, don't forget you may have the client area email and a control panel email. You'll probably need to change the portal email separately.

A few providers perform some verification such as an email to the old or new address. One provider asked that I send an email from both the old and new account to verify the change. Another asked for a payment id on a recent bill for verification. One provider demanded I present a government issued id. I promptly cancelled service with that provider.

Self-service is always nice, but I imagine the providers don't allow this are protecting accounts from hijacks? If so. some additional verification account verification (e.g. sending emails to or from both accounts) seems perfectly reasonable to me. Performing additional verification such as payment ids is not entirely unwarranted. Hopefully this happens infrequently since I hate creating any support tickets with LE providers, presumably their margins are thin enough without additional support burden.

If you lose access to an email, then additional verification through support seems both necessary and desirable. If that happened to me, I might want the provider to issue some additional challenge so I know they're being cautious.

Overall, almost all providers make this fairly painless, but there is a large degree of inconsistency. The process varies. I'd suggest providers put something in their knowledge base about changing email addresses. It seems almost no one does this.

Comments

  • WilliamWilliam Member
    edited May 2021

    @jtk said: Another asked for a payment id on a recent bill for verification. One provider demanded I present a government issued id. I promptly cancelled service with that provider.

    WTF.

    I let customers simply change it, the billing sends an email to verify anyway - Logic behind this is if you have the User/Pass already you are fucked anyway, no matter if someone can change the email. I also let customers revert it with an ID that matches customer data in case of hack or similar, but this never happens,

    Receiving and storing IDs (attachment or mail counts as storing, even if deleted later) is a GDPR nightmare.

    Thanked by 1jtk
  • deankdeank Member, Troll

    What? OP isn't a bot?

    I thought he was a bot.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited May 2021

    @William said:

    @jtk said: Another asked for a payment id on a recent bill for verification. One provider demanded I present a government issued id. I promptly cancelled service with that provider.

    WTF.

    I let customers simply change it, the billing sends an email to verify anyway - Logic behind this is if you have the User/Pass already you are fucked anyway, no matter if someone can change the email. I also let customers revert it with an ID that matches customer data in case of hack or similar, but this never happens,

    Receiving and storing IDs (attachment or mail counts as storing, even if deleted later) is a GDPR nightmare.

    I make customers do it if they want to me to change billing emails for them, while emailing me from another address. They’re free to not send it and instead abandon the account, but handing out accounts to anyone who says “it’s mine” is by far the greater evil. I delete the IDs afterwards but really, there’s no perfect system for this. Customers shouldn’t be asking such things to begin with, their login email is their access. Losing access to it is negligent and dangerous, asking that an account be handed over to a new email is asking for a social engineering exploit.

    Thanked by 1yoursunny
  • NyrNyr Community Contributor, Veteran

    @jtk said: One provider asked that I send an email from both the old and new account to verify the change.

    Providers who do this without authenticating the email source (all of them?) are asking for trouble.

    I have seen companies (even a popular European neobank) do this for deleting accounts or other administrative requests and it is extremely bad practice which surprisingly does not get exploited often.

    Thanked by 1jtk
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