1 account per e-mail limit

I (and probably others) have issues with the 1 chat client per e-mail account limit. It’s happened often that I had to help clients who no longer could access their chat account.
Most times it’s a case of forgotten password which is easy enough to fix if they have access to their e-mail account. But, all too often, they don’t have access and the only solution is then to create a new chat account, which is refused if you state the same e-mail (e-mail already in use) and we have to resort to creating an account with a fake e-mail or create a new e-mail account - never a good idea either way…
I see 2 possible solutions to this problem; either allow multiple clients on 1 e-mail or whenever a client is removed from the rank list his e-mail is also removed from the database, allowing it to be reused…
Cheers; Speedy

Hello,

I can certainly understand how losing access to an account can be frustrating for users.

Allowing multiple emails to exist under one account poses a few issues:

  1. Security

If an account has multiple emails, this increases the likelihood that their account may be compromised, since many users reuse passwords across different accounts.

  1. More difficult to comply with GDPR/CCPA and other privacy regulations

We try to collect the least amount of information possible to provide the service.

Privacy regulations require us to be more conscious about the data we collect.

  1. Notification emails

If a user has multiple emails under one account, we would need to send out different types of account notification emails to all of their emails.

For example, if their password is changed, and they have 3 email addresses under one account, they would need to receive 3 email notifications for that.

While this is possible, this makes it more likely that our emails will be marked as spam, or ignored, leading to additional risks of accounts being compromised.

Regarding your other suggestion about removing an account email if removed from the rank list:

For classic chats (chats hosted on https://minnit.chat), accounts can be ranked on multiple chats, or have their own chats.

If you remove a user from a rank list in your chat, they may be ranked in other chats, so we couldn’t remove their email in that instance.

There is actually an existing solution here:

  1. Convert your classic chat to an organization

You can learn more about organizations here.

Organizations were launched after classic chats, and give you greater flexibility over accounts and will allow you as the owner to control a few different settings that may help:

  • Disable the requirement to enter an email to register an account
  • Change the password or email under accounts (some exceptions apply)

This main disadvantage of moving to an organization, is that everyone will have to re-register an account.

If you’d like to move to an organization, please create an organization here and contact support and we can migrate your chat settings over.

Alternatively, if a user loses access to their account on a classic chat, they can always contact support and we’ll help them reset their password even if they have lost access to their email once we have verified that they own the account.

In addition to what Kevin said, if a user only has one email, and lost access to their account, they can just select forgot password on the login page, and get it reset that way.