3867f58dddae I'm not an expert at this (we didn't bother to migrate customers or change their email addresses as it was too much work) - but when you migrate the "customer" to an Atlassian account, you get an Atlassian user in Atlassian Admin that is "Active" but has no "chargeable products" (they have "Jira Service Management" "Customer product role" but that doesn't charge you). This option is a workaround for previous Jira license holders that are returning to be "just a customer" too (disable their products, not the whole user).

In theory, at that point, IF you have domain admin (an escalated version of admin) where you can see "Managed Accounts" you can use that - not normal Atlassian Admin - to change the email address on the account (getting access to "Managed Accounts" if you haven't got it already isn't always the easiest thing either). 

Unfortunately even then, there's no bulk admin, and something you may bump into is if the user has attempted to log in using their "new email", that may be in the system too - which will block you from changing the email address (this applies to normal Atlassian paid product users too) of the old Atlassian account.

That is - if you try to change marc@oldacme.org to marc@newacme.org , and marc@newacme.org exists, the system will say no. 

Then you need to check if marc@newacme.org exists legitimately somewhere else - so looking in Managed Accounts for that email, and seeing if it's used for some other Atlassian product like Trello or Bitbucket.

If NOT, then you can delete the "dodgy new account" which has no products (which sends a scary warning to the user which makes them panic - so you may want to warn them in advance to ignore that, if you do), wait two weeks (as it doesn't delete straight away), and then change the email on the old account finally.

If it IS used legitimately somewhere else, then you're a bit stuck - where you may end up having to disable the old user and set them up in Jira and/or Confluence again with the same permissions as the old one - which for a customer-only account defeats the purpose of the whole exercise (as they'll lose access to their old calls anyway - and in the case of Jira licensed users, they'll lose access to calls, queries, dashboards, etc that they may have had on the old account). Note also that while you can "fix" a lot of things for Jira licensed users by changing ownership or doing bulk edits, Jira still doesn't let you bulk edit Request Participants (another call we're waiting for) - which effects Jira Service Management in a huge way

Also it isn't great if your organisation is doing a gradual migration of email accounts - because I think while there's some way to use the API to bulk change things in Atlassian that's not helpful if you're not sure if the user has updated their email or not (without manually checking the email directory one by one). 

So to summarise, migrating to an Atlassian account will not cost you a new license (yay), but it still won't get you bulk edit, and unless you can get to "Managed Accounts" you won't be able to change the email anyway - and it will be VERY PAINFUL. Sorry. 

When you migrate a portal only customer to a migrated account, will it keep the setup as customer?  I don't want to pay a license for them in Jira.  They need portal only access and I need to change their email address for the same reason?  Also, bulk edit would be nice too.  

We use Jira Customers for internal as well.  We have 250+branches that we support nationwide and use Jira for our ticketing.  I only want my branch guys to have access to the portal so I added them all as customers.  Now we rebranded and have a different domain name that I want to update them all to.  I can't do that and can't find an API setup that shows how to bulk edit them. All I need to do is change the domain part of the email address.  So, if migrating them to an Atlassian account is the right way, 1. does that keep them as customer only and 2. can that be bulk edited at that point to change the email address?   Otherwise it's migrate, then open each one again and update the email address.  That is close to 1500 emails.  Insights or direction on where I can turn for answers?  

Not only is this needed for admin. There should also be an option to bulk update them. I have many companies under my instance that have rebranded and it's impossible to update their email while keeping the ticket history.

Don't worry 75f3e0bc41b1. We got an update 2 years ago! That should keep us going for another 2 years at least...

Perhaps then we will get an ETA on this basic feature.

As you can tell, we are pretty disappointed with the lack of interaction from the product team on what I would consider one of the features that have a large following. 

We also represent an organisation that has 1000s of users who are undergoing a gradual, country by country domain change which is an extremely jarring process because of this limitation. 

Hello Atlassian... I add my voice to my fellow paying Atlassian Users and Administrators here!  And more than that, I echo the voices of the MANY, MANY, MANY end-users who are impacted by this system-limitation. (Not to mention the voiceless costs impacting our businesses, our productivity, reputation, etc.)

Please keep in mind – there are currently 669 votes on this issue. If each of these votes represent 500+ users (like in my instance – I vote on behalf of my 600 paid users & our 4900 unique JSM "Customers" ) then we're looking at (a minimum) between 334,500-3,000,000+ users potentially being impacted by this limitation. 

*NOTE: I hope you'll please keep this in mind for ALL or our open Atlassian tickets! Every vote counts x1000 !!!!*

With respect, I thank you,

Mark

We had a recent issue that their account/email was set up as a their legal name instead of preferred and we're stuck on not being able to change it.

Thankfully they don't currently have a large amount of data and can work around, but it's inconvenient.

We are currently using server instances and we manage our users' accounts, including managing their names, emails, and other metadata. However, we are facing challenges with the migration to the cloud, particularly concerning this aspect.

This issue is of critical importance to us, and we need to find a solution or workaround as soon as possible. The ability to edit JSM customer emails through the GUI or API on the cloud instances is crucial for our operations.

Hey Atlassian - I note that this issue is now been outstanding for almost six years, not only that but looking at the history it would suggest that this is a bug that didn't exist back in May 2017 and was therefore introduced as one of your 'upgrades'.  How long does it take you to fix bug's like this?  I've just come across it for the first time, but this will now obviously cause problems when someone changes their email address.  Poor.

Why have 'portal only' customer accounts as an option then??  If we have to make them Jira users to actually be able to manage them, then just make them Jira users to begin with.  You are overcomplicating so much functionality!

I don´t undestand Atlassian's prioritization system. We have Jira for 1 year and I have encountered so many years old cases that would be...no... that are basically must have! Yet Atlassian keeps publishing new features we have no use for.

Found an even more frustrating issue with not being able to change customers email addresses

When the customer replies to a ticket via email, it now opens a new ticket instead of adding the reply to the current ticket.
I'm guessing because the email addresses don't match up. extremely frustrating. 

This is such a basic necessity to be able to change email addresses. come one Jira please! 

It is crucial für customers (or admins) to change customers' mail address. We can not only loose the reference to old issues but especially for "Assets" (where the customers are also in use!)

This is more than disappointing - evenmoreso as this is a known issue for five years.
Changes of names or domain changes are a common thing. 

How is this considered enterprise ready? That's infuriating. 

Hi @Steve,

You actually can change the display name.

Go to:

1. Administration
2. Jira Service Management
3. Find the relevant customer (by searching)
4. click on "Edit full name" on the actions column

Can't even change display name of customer? Only create customer? Crazy!

This is very problematic. Our customers are changing email address even when still in same company because of rebranding or other reasons and they need to be able to keep track of their issues with us.

This needs to be a priority issue for Atlassian!

We have this need as well!  We're new to Jira and this came up in the first month of using it with our clients.  One client has rebranded and as such, they have renamed their business including their email domain.

It seems that my only option is to send brand new invites and then go update all of their tickets to be with the new contact.

It's quite disappointing that this has been an issue for so long.

I would say that it is difficult to call it a workaround. Especially when you have a lot of customers and they have changed the domain, for example. It's a basic need to change email. Too bad Atlassian hasn't seen fit to fix this yet. I just hope this ticket doesn't get closed, like so many others, simply because new features are more important than improving existing ones.

@Anthony Cummings this shouldn't necessarily be the case. Just be sure to disable product access for those users and if suitable for your situation, update your site’s default product access settings as well.

It is definitely not ideal (far from) but this does work as a workaround as I've tried it myself as well.

It's just ridiculous that this is missing. We have to create a new user when the email address changes of a customer.

the "workaround" really is not a workaround at all.

If we migrate a customer account to an Atlassian account, then it will become a paid for account.

We should not have to pay for a users account simply because the name / email address has changed, genuinely cannot fathom how this has not been addressed or taken seriously by the Atlassian team.

Surely a simple use case would highlight the need for this? Unless the use case looked something like this:

"Customer A has been rebranded, and has a NewCo domain. All employee email addresses will change to the NewCo domain, so all employees will have a new email address they'll use to submit and respond to JSM tickets.

Customer employees should have to re-register with JSM. JSM Administrator should spent silly amounts of time walking customer employees through this, and then explaining why they can't see the tickets they've previously raised (yes, it is hard to believe). Chaos should ensue."

The workaround did not work for me. Now the users can't even log into the site. Very disappointing... 

For the 4th time across 3 years, bump.

Adding my boys to the list of people who are desperately waiting for this feature to become available. This is incredibly disappointing such a basic function is not available

This may not have much traction, but this workaround is not even proper. 

Best is to modify customer's email address through admin or customer himself.

But as a workaround, hoping to invite the new email address and transfer all old customer tickets to newly invited user - but even this is not possible.

Honestly, it is ridiculous that it's not possible to change the email address of portal only customer either through the admin or the customer himself.

53972bbda268,739e4b86ee2c,cb9318520a01, thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I apologise for the lack of updates on this feature request.

Although we understand the value of this feature, we do not have a short term timeline for its delivery. The main reason for this is there are dependent projects that need to be completed first.

I recently published a blog looking at our customer management vision https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management-articles/Choosing-the-right-approach-to-Customer-Management-in-Jira/ba-p/1970761. I hope to be in a position to prioritise this feature in the next horizon of this vision. It is definitely amongst the top requirements for External Customers.

I will update again at the end of the year, or if anything changes.

I'm sure this ability is being discussed at the corporate/finance level, trying to figure out how they could leverage our customers in order to gain more "side" business (just my intuition) since technical feasibility for this this is not rocket science and the need is clear and super basic.

This and many other Atlassian hiccups just make me start hoping Salesforce comes up with a more competitive pricing model for their Service module so we can finally migrate all our support onto our Salesforce platform and have a true centralized customer view (as many other companies hope I'm sure).

What I don't understand is considering that this "feature request / bug" is voted into the top 20 and there appears to be no involvement from Atlassian in this ticket. At the top we were told by Ben there would be an update by June 2021 and still nothing.

If I missed deadlines by this kind of margin at work I would be out of a job.

We have considered moving our customer accounts to Atlassian cloud accounts so we can change the address and have SSO but are limited by a number of factors:

1. Agents can invite new customers and add them to tickets. They then again become Portal Only Customers
2. Migrate to Atlassian Cloud Accounts have to be done 1 by 1. No Bulk option.

It would seriously make life so much easier to enable the update of email addresses for portal only customers. Come on now....

We are paying a lot of money for this piece of ... software.

Atlassian: Hey, that is not a problem. Here is a workaround. Next month we need to increase the prices to hold the high level of quality ....

We are feeling that pain too.

I just can't believe that there is still no way to change a customer's email address. it's so frustrating.

Benjamin,

Is this still only a "future consideration"?

Does Atlassian not think this is a major functionality gap?

We bumped into this too - and it's not so much "letting our users sign in with the new email they're using to avoid confusion" it is:

As far as I can see, if any Service Desk has "Customer permissions" set to "Customers added by agents or admins" (that is, "invitation only"), if a customer replies to a notification email by email, that reply will DISAPPEAR (as the reply will be from the new email which isn't registered to the service desk).

As far as I can see (again), it won't bounce (notifying the customer that there is a problem), it will just not add the comment. The customer will presume their call has been updated and their information has been submitted. It won't.

At the very least, if the customer was able to change their own email, we'd be able to mass mail the customer list with instructions on how to do that - and that would "delegate potential problems" to the customer (not a great idea but better than nothing). 

This closely relates to changing the emails of licensed users - which, while possible, is hardly ideal either.

Scott

Hi Benjamin,

Just checking if there is any update on this feature request.

Thx for the feedback.

Kind regards,

Dirk

Hi @Benjamin Paton

Are there any further updates on this item?

I was hoping for an update in new FY (July 2021) regarding progress.

It would be useful if you could decide on the terminology for Customers/Organizations and this user type as you refer to them differently is various places on the UI as customers (which is how you also refer to organisations) or members which can be confusing for new starters using JSM. Personally I like member of an organization.

There is also an issue when you do attempt to update a user via the View profile as this redirects to an "Looks like we’re off the beaten track" page, as I assume that JSM is expecting the organization member to be a part of the directory, which they are obviously not.

Providing the ability for an organization customer/member to be able to update their email address or allow Jira Service Management agents or system administrator the ability to do this is very important. Currently we have to delete the user (organization customer/member) from the organization and then re-invite them which is not ideal.

Best regards
Jon

Here's another why, we hit today, affecting 000's of users we just dropped as we move to Portal:

Scenario

• create standard (non-portal, SSO) user with email user@blah.com
• revoke access
• remove user
• attempt sign up as user via portal view with email user@blah.com
• no portal account created, the sign up email is never received by user despite UI saying it has sent

Potential workaround, not possible because of this issue

• sign up as user via portal view with email user+test@blah.com
• change email account to user@blah.com hopefully bypassing the problem above.

Thanks amitg967395662 for your detailed example. This really highlights the pain point.

@Benjamin Paton,

The scenarios people mentioned above are the precise reason and they happen very often.

Today one of our customer companies changed their domain, now I need to re-create multiple accounts, migrate each of their existing tickets, update our internal systems with the new Jira IDs (since we have tight integrations), delete previous accounts and also explain to our customers that Jira doesn't support changing an email address and this is why they have a new invite / account to set up.

This happens more and more as we are a fast growing company. I average more than two cases a day, taking away from my time, delaying customer support and causing our customers extra work.

Ability to change an email address is very basic in almost any information system. Feels silly that we need to "beg" for it.

As we scale up, this is becoming a larger issue, and we can not live with it for much longer. Hopefully this will be implemented within a couple months, so we can stay productive and happy customers of Atlassian.

Thanks all for the feedback. Super valuable. 

This is also needed for us for the same reasons, company splits and mergers, naming policy changes etc.

It's definitely a common thing for us. 

@benjamin Paton

Also chiming in here,

A few reasons are

1. Change in company name therefore a change in domain name, emails, branding etc.
2. Merger, an old company was taken over, change of Emails to the new company domain.
3. Change in name from marriage.
4. Customer updating internal emails to change formats firstname@company to firstname.lastname@company
5. Or any other reason a customer might deem it necessary to change email addresses

I'm sure there are many more examples and reasons, but it is an odd question in that you assume peoples Email address won't change.

Chris

@Benjamin Paton

I put in the wrong email address when I typed it in for the customer. I had made about 11 tickets at that point and then emailed the customer at his right address the link to a ticket in the Portal, but they couldn't access those tickets because they were for the wrong address. It would've been great to just update their email address, like I can their name. Instead I created a new customer with their correct email address and then bulk edited all the other tickets to change the reporter to the new customer record.

Like @Kel Hill, there are reasons administrators want to change their customer's email address. In the same way you let us edit their name.

@Benjamin Paton

Chiming in to provide my own answer to your question directed at Harry Park...

Customers can have a need to change their email addresses for any number of reasons. Some women still change their names when they marry. Some people change their names for reasons other than marriage. Some people work for companies who change their domain name and then change all their email addresses to that new domain. There are lots of reasons.

Thanks for the feedback eb66f17fcba0. Are you able to explain the scenario that led to you need to change a customers email address?

Just ran into this problem. It's pretty crappy to not be able to edit a customer email address.

Hey all, 

Small update here. I am evaluating this request as a part of a broader Customer Management strategy. Our focus is to improve the experience of managing customers. 

The soonest I will be able to provide an update for this issue again will be the start of the new FY (July 2021).

In the meanwhile I might reach out for some feedback on this issue, or one of the related "managing customer email address" requests.

Cheers, 

Ben.

I'm a massive Jira fan and have managed to convince my organisation to invest in Jira (time, effort, reputation), so I really want Jira to work and I want to be proud of Jira again.  I think it would be really good for Atlassian to hold a breakout session at the forthcoming Atlassian World event thing on the new issue view and other annoyances that people have with Jira to restore the faith and make us proud Jira champions again.

Any other suggestions for a replacement for Jira Service Desk?

Preferably something that can sync tickets to Jira (or at least some export/import API), but it has to have its own customer facing piece without any ugliness and functional limitations of Jira Service Desk being exposed to customers.

H10Admin - for our purposes HubSpot. We already have the free version for deals - and this comes with a service ticket capability that is very good. Different - but simpler.

Dan Morley - What product did you end up going with to replace Jira?

shannon.hamilton - I ditched Jira Service Desk (in fact all of Jira) completely when I realised they had no interest in this issue. I'm not risking my business reputation on software that has little to no care factor from it's vendor. Atlassian has a startling lack of service given it's huge database of paying customers and revenue.

+1 for voting this needs to be fixed asap. This is really basic functionality. As mentioned above, almost 4 years and no movement? Seriously??? Was about to go live with this as the primary helpdesk for my MSP. Now starting to look at other options..

Hi Yes this issue also affecting me - not well thought out really.

Please fix this issue?

Almost 4 years and no movement.

I say we start cancelling accounts, and maybe that will bring some priority to this.

Thanks for the update. Just added my vote to this too as this is causing us a headache.

Hello everyone, thanks for voting and watching this issue.

We are looking into this, and realise it is something we need to fix. Unfortunately there are higher priority items on our current near term roadmap and I want to be super transparent with you.

So, I am changing status to 'future consideration' because we will be looking at our priorities again in the coming months and will need to figure out how to bring this in.

Rest assured we are not ignoring this issue, but the solution is not super straight forward and has a few dependencies we need to resolve first.

Sorry this is not the answer your were hoping for, but please keep watching and we will update as soon as it is in the nearterm roadmap. 

Liron

How is this a suggestion and not a bug? JSM portal-only customers must be able to update their own email address. 

I would like to upvote the need for this improvement. 

Hi Just spoken to Jira agent - this issue affecting me - I have suggested a user merge feature.

Thank you
Charlotte 

Hi Yes this issue also affecting me - not well thought out really