Frustrations with changing email address

  • Unknown's avatar
    unklee · Member ·

    I have several sites on wordpress.com, plus one site on an external host. The wordpress.com sites use two different accounts and two different email addresses. The external site of course has yet another account with its own email address.

    A couple of the email addresses used in these sites appear to have been hacked, and I want to close them down, and use one email address of mine for all the sites. Yet when I try to change the email address in my account settings, I get the message “That e-mail address is already being used.”

    I’m not aware that I have used that email address anywhere on WordPress, but WordPress thinks I have (and may be right, I just can’t remember).

    How can I find out where WordPress thinks I have used that email address and can I use the one email address for several wordpress.com and an external WordPress site?

    Thanks for any advice.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    unklee · Member ·

    Just a clarification and a correction. I actually have 2 external sites, and the email address I want to use for the wordpress.com sites is the one I use for one of the external WordPress sites.

    Does that mean that wordpres.com knows I have used the email address on an external wordpress site and won’t allow me to use it again???

    Thanks again for any help.

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Yet when I try to change the email address in my account settings, I get the message “That e-mail address is already being used.”

    This means that the email is already associated with another WordPress.com account. To get access to that account you can enter that email address in the password reset tool:

    https://en.wordpress.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

    Does that mean that wordpres.com knows I have used the email address on an external wordpress site and won’t allow me to use it again???

    No, that’s not possible. Any website that’s not hosted by WordPress.com can use any email address even one that’s been used by a WordPress.com account.

  • Unknown's avatar
    teacherworkload · Member ·

    having the same error message but i have closed the account the email address i want to change to is linked to

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    Email addresses on closed accounts are reserved for a time.

    Have you thought about using a gmail alias? Instead of using this:

    yourrealemail (at) gmail (dot) com

    Use this:

    yourrealemail+otheraccount (at) gmail (dot) com

    You can make that +1, +whatever, +doesnotmatter … whatever letters or numbers make the most sense to you. Gmail will ignore the plus sign and anything after it. But we won’t, so it’s in effect a second email account that delivers to the same address.

    Want to give that a try?

  • Unknown's avatar
    hokonuieric · Member ·

    Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

    Assuming you are right, fstst, then I must have an account I don’t remember – maybe a trial site I started sometime and have forgotten.

    But your idea, macmanx, works like a charm. Such a cool way out of the problem. Thanks heaps!

  • Unknown's avatar
    unklee · Member ·

    Sorry, that was me under another name!

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @hokonuieric one trick that works for many accounts: try logging in with the email address in question. Or, you can try resetting your password with that address.

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