It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change

Posted by amukbils 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by dkobia 1 day ago

This is probably one of those tickets on the backlog that is constantly kicked down the road. Always superseded by a new fire.

Comment by oytis 1 day ago

We have just cut the costs of software development by 90% didn't we?

Comment by DANmode 1 day ago

While pushing the requirement for speed of development up by only 100%!

Comment by nomel 1 day ago

Even if that's were true, I would be very surprised if this caused a loss of even 0.0000001% annual revenue. Going to need more 9's in that number.

edit: If you don't understand why this is actually important, realize that they're burning billions. They don't focus their devs on things that generate revenue, or the light will go out.

Comment by aleph_minus_one 1 day ago

OpenAI has no idea what is the cause of the problem, but once OpenAI has built a general intelligent system, they will ask it for a way to fix this bug.

(for those who don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1886s (31:26 - 32:13)).

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by browningstreet 1 day ago

Neither does Replit, and your Replit email has to match your GitHub if you want the two to talk. I guess this is what running and not walking looks like.

Comment by amasad 1 day ago

We do let you change it; under your account setting there is a email with an edit button next to it. And it shouldn’t need to match your GitHub email.

Perhaps there is some weirdness if you’ve signed up with GitHub. Feel free to email me and we can take a look: amjad@repl.it

Comment by browningstreet 1 day ago

Thanks, but.. this was true as of some months ago. And I definitely was told by support that my [personal] email couldn’t connect to my [consulting] GitHub email account. I re-arranged quite a lot of my tech life to connect the two, per Replit support.

But I’ll double check tomorrow and reach out if I find anything worth sharing.

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Comment by breakfastduck 1 day ago

This kind of stuff is simply a result to certain companies having a userbase bigger than they maybe even want (especially when offering a free tier).

They can get away with not implementing even basic stuff, becauase their core feature is all 99% of the users even care about.

Comment by lxgr 1 day ago

At some point, it must be worth it to implement this just for the sake of their customer support team alone.

Then again, they have LLMs that can just deflect all "change email" related questions to an FAQ article containing the "wontfix" information...

Comment by jaggederest 1 day ago

Steam also has usernames that can't be changed. They added changing the actual email address associated with your account, but your original email address as account name is frozen forever, for old accounts.

Since 2003!

Comment by accrual 1 day ago

That's wild. I guess I've never experienced it because I still have the email attached to my nearly 15+ year old Steam account.

Some tangently related anecdata: VRChat has a pretty strict email-changing policy. You need to confirm you own both the VR account and the original email account. Reasonable, but can be tricky if you don't have access to the original email anymore. I was able to navigate it but yeah, it's not always simple.

Comment by VariousPrograms 1 day ago

My misspelled My Chemical Romance lyrics @yahoo.com address will never die because of this.

Comment by ItsDedo 14 hours ago

Ah yes, that happened quite a lot when I was a young boy.

Comment by haunter 1 day ago

HN doesn’t allow you to delete your account or erase/overwrite any of your old comments

Comment by Invictus0 1 day ago

that's by design

Comment by esterna 1 day ago

Isn't that in violation of GDPR?

Comment by monerozcash 1 day ago

No. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

>Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:

>for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information;

dang will randomize your username on request though, which is compliant. Everything else on your profile you can delete yourself.

Comment by tomhow 1 day ago

To be clear, we will redact personally identifying information and do other things to prevent someone's past HN activity from causing them any trouble in the future. We certainly don't want to cause anyone any trouble and will do whatever we can to prevent that. Our concern is only to avoid gutting past threads and ruining them for the others who participated in in them and for future readers who may find the content of the discussions interesting.

Comment by j_w 22 hours ago

Which is great. The redaction of information from places like Reddit that has taken place makes some discussion/references unreadable now. Decade old HN threads still retain all their juicy context.

Comment by GeoAtreides 20 hours ago

Can you confirm you have sought legal advice on whether the policy of not deleting user data on HN is compliant with GDPR and whether is indeed compliant (or not)?

Comment by tomhow 20 hours ago

YC has a legal department, and they do ongoing analysis to determine our position relating to the different privacy regulatory systems around the world. As I said in the other reply, we’re willing to go to great lengths to protect people’s privacy.

Comment by monerozcash 20 hours ago

FWIW this is widely accepted best practice, and Art. 85 GDPR is also very clear that data processing for journalistic, academic, artistic or literary expression is exempt.

Comment by dabockster 1 day ago

Oof that's bad. Makes it seem like ChatGPT is really more hacked together than we all want to admit.

Comment by efskap 1 day ago

ChatGPT is just a consumer of their identity/auth system though, same as their core product - the API. Considering ChatGPT came much later, it seems irrelevant.

Comment by TZubiri 1 day ago

I don't think their API is their core product. The chat application is not only used by more people, but it drives development of the API.

Comment by amukbils 1 day ago

Drives more revenue too. But I still think in the long run, APIs will bring more revenue.

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Comment by guestbest 1 day ago

I’d say the consumer front end is more of an afterthought. It also seems like something they want to get rid of at some point so that they have to deal with the resellers like Microsoft did in the 90s with MS Windows

Comment by ukblewis 1 day ago

And yet it is still better than Gemini’s front end

Comment by mgiampapa 1 day ago

All software is more hacked together than we want to admit.

Comment by hansvm 1 day ago

The model might be fine (I have questions, but let's assume it's reasonable), but I don't think anyone could use the UI for more than a few minutes and not realize it was a hack job.

For one fun one, on mobile web (android/chrome) you can't insert a space in the middle of a "word" you created by deleting the space between two words. The deletion is immediately reverted by some JS abomination.

It's one thing to call that an unimportant bug, but it calls into question a whole chain of decisions leading to that moment, and it's far from an isolated incident. As always there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/463/

Comment by nrhrjrjrjtntbt 1 day ago

Create table account (email varchar(255) primary ....

Comment by dietr1ch 1 day ago

But ChatGPT told me to run that, so I did.

Comment by amukbils 1 day ago

No mention of the reason why. Seems like a foundation feature. Ran into trouble more than once by their bad auth system.

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

My five cents for a guess: they've used the email as an index somewhere, which massive amount of data now depends on and they keep pushing forward the need of migrating away from that because it'll be painful and take long time.

Comment by guestbest 1 day ago

Maybe they could use Claude and speed up that development.

Comment by amukbils 1 day ago

That's a good guess .. but I bet they are also paying price for this in support costs .. I'd be curious what percentage of their support tickets are related to this (also the require you to cancel subscription, create a new account, create a new subscription if you want to change a pro account)

Comment by clickety_clack 1 day ago

I’d say it’s a rookie mistake, but they’re a half-trillion dollar company, so maybe I _should_ use email address as an id?

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

Yeah, but imagine the first engineers at ChatGPT back in 2021, some thrown together group of people who knew frontend the best from OpenAI, a research lab, to create a quick prototype UI for chatting with a text generating ML model. Of course they'll take some shortcuts, that's to be expected. All of this is just guesses though, but seen similar things play out many times. Of course, at one point someone needs to step in and pause for a moment to plan ahead for a bit, but depending on the leadership, it isn't always so easy to do.

Comment by tobyjsullivan 1 day ago

No doubt there’s a lesson in there, but I don’t think it’s a technical one.

Comment by NewsaHackO 1 day ago

Maybe they used ChatGPT 1.0 to vibe code it

Comment by Marsymars 1 day ago

Philips Hue also doesn't allow for an email change, and they've been around longer than OpenAI. And if you want to delete your Philips Hue account to create a new one with a new email there's considerable pain involved if you have a house with many Hue products.

Comment by eek2121 1 day ago

They used to not even need an email.

You can use 3rd party apps/tools to get around this, FWIW.

I use OpenHue on Linux. On iOS I've not had much luck finding a quality app, however a long time ago I did find a good one for Android...(I just don't remember the name, sorry.)

The account login crap is ridiculous, considering you don't even need internet to use their stuff. The lack of needing a login was the whole reason I bought into the ecosystem to begin with.

Comment by lxgr 1 day ago

That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?

The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.

Comment by gucci-on-fleek 1 day ago

> That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?

It requires a Hue bridge, but all the official Hue apps need that too (unless you're using the new Bluetooth support, which very few people are). You shouldn't need any other hardware though.

> The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.

Locally, it doesn't really matter, since everything just goes over the local network. You're definitely correct for remote access though, but I hardly ever need to control my lights remotely.

Comment by lucasban 1 day ago

Phone either, I’ve moved countries and no longer have access to the phone number I signed up with. I was hoping they’d address this before that number came up for reassignment but maybe not at this rate.

Comment by QuiCasseRien 1 day ago

You're kidding ?

I created an google account, use it on my android smartphone and buy some app, many years ago.

It's 2026 and Google still doesn't allow email change.

Comment by amukbils 1 day ago

You cannot change your google email itself .. because there's no other reference to identify you with them. But you can use your email as the "inbox" for all other services. OpenAI doesn't have an "inbox" .. they accept other "inboxes" so they should allow you to change it.

Comment by danpalmer 1 day ago

What do you mean? I've changed my email on my Google account a bunch of times.

Comment by reorder9695 1 day ago

Google only allows email changes if you didn't create it with a gmail address. When I found this out years ago I immediately scrapped that account and created a new one with a non gmail address before there was too much on the original account.

Comment by danpalmer 1 day ago

That might be technically true, but in practice not an issue. I have a Gmail account, so the primary address is fixed because the address is the account, however I use a different address to sign-in, and Google recognises those addresses as being on that account. For pretty much all uses my account has a different email address.

Comment by motoboi 1 day ago

Seeing that their product keeps improving I’m actually fascinated by that level of discipline.

Total focus on the main product, which is the API.

Comment by spiralcoaster 1 day ago

This is a hilarious take.

Car company makes innovative new car engine for their vehicle. A user wants to get a replacement key made for the vehicle, but company doesn't have the process in place to make replacement keys:

Are you fascinated by this hypothetical companies level of discipline? Or would you consider it negligent and inept?

Comment by motoboi 1 day ago

If the car in question were the probably most hot software in town and the user wants to change the photos on their profiles, I'd find it very interesting if they kept the discipline to focus the whole team away from such a low-priority change and into the priority of keeping it the most hot software in town.

Let's keep in mind that OpenAI is a small company (in people terms), and they are fighting toe to toe with Google.

Heck, if they mess up a quarter they are probably dead.

Comment by JohnMakin 18 hours ago

Besides the fact you're completely shifting the goal post here on analogies, changing email address is a pretty normal feature of any service pretending to be serious. Also, you seem to have the belief it is impossible for such a large company with such investment to work on multiple things simultaneously.

Comment by motoboi 16 hours ago

The fact that they can, but choose not to is exactly the fact I’m astonished with.

Comment by efskap 1 day ago

Authentication to the API platform seems like an important part of that product.

Comment by thiht 1 day ago

Allowing users to change emails is surprisingly tricky:

- if they verified their email, are they allowed to change it?

- if so, can they use the new email for anything as long as it’s not verified, or does it stay in pending state? for how long?

- if it’s in a pending state, can someone signup with a "pending state" email?

- does the email change need to be validated by sending a validation email to the previous email addresses?

- once changed, can an email address be reused for another account? That’s a dangerous one but if you don’t support it you end up shamed on HN with "OpenAI doesn’t allow me to create an account with an email address that used to be associated with an account on their platform but isn’t anymore"

I’m probably missing 10 more bullet points.

I bet most comments in this thread didn’t think beyond "UPDATE accounts SET email = $1"

Comment by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1 day ago

Password change also requires you to use forgot password flow too, rather than a straightforward change password button.

I guess development teams are all focused on feature delivery and research.

Comment by amukbils 1 day ago

According to Gemini, it's because OpenAI uses the email as the unique identifier of the user. But if that were the case, it's probably an week's project for a single engineer at most. I thought there was a better reason for this like some security measure for such a fast growing company, it never occurred to me that the reason could be so simple

Comment by lxgr 1 day ago

Nor changing the phone number. But who would ever need to change their phone number, right?

Comment by accrual 1 day ago

Maybe email is a primary key in OpenAI's database somewhere? Half joking :D

Comment by piskov 1 day ago

Funny how this vanished from the main page faster than hot cakes.

Saying from experience getting flagged previously while reporting changes in OpenAI’s policy regarding medical and law advice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777828

Comment by greatgib 1 day ago

That's what happen when the future is vibe coded...

Comment by kundi 1 day ago

Change the provider, and problem is solved.

Comment by lxgr 1 day ago

To which one? Claude doesn't support it either [1], and Gemini is tied to a Gmail address to begin with.

[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8452276-how-do-i-chan...

Comment by mopsi 1 day ago

Why don't they just ask AI to implement it?

Comment by richardw 1 day ago

Or phone number. My phone is linked to one in another country. I’ve been here for 3 years.

Comment by lxgr 1 day ago

Yep, same here. Fortunately they don't seem to use it for anything yet, somewhat begging the question of why it's there in the first place. (It doesn't need to be stored in a user-visible way if the only purpose is as a poor/annoying "proof of humanity" against sockpuppet accounts).

Update: I just checked, out of curiosity – seems to be gone now?

Comment by piskov 1 day ago

It was used to geofence access to some countries a few years ago, if I remember correctly.

Comment by TZubiri 1 day ago

I'm on board with this, imagine the headaches and development costs of adding this feature and 100 other QoL features. It would absorb energy and complexity budget that could be spent on core product features.

Comment by andrewmcwatters 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by oytis 1 day ago

Your email is your identity. If they allow you to change your email, what they should refer you by, your passport number? Was kind of easier in the times of usernames, but these are long gone

Comment by esafak 1 day ago

You can use a random numerical ID as PK and let people associate as many authn IDs as they want after logging in with one.

Comment by Reubachi 19 hours ago

Who in this scenario outlines the key infrastructure, and how is the private key maintained?

Comment by esafak 19 hours ago

primary key. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_key

Comment by thiht 1 day ago

Why would you allow this complexity for basically nothing?

Comment by esafak 20 hours ago

Using a separate table for authn is a basic pattern for this problem. What would you do?

Comment by lxgr 1 day ago

Most services I know allow changing both.

Comment by wizzwizz4 1 day ago

They should use the integer primary key of the users table, of course.

Comment by piskov 1 day ago

Nah, that’s too 1985.

Because client doesn’t know it, inserts can be slow in cross-db environment.

Guid is always better (can be client generated), and modern guid versions can be ordered chronologically

Comment by oytis 1 day ago

Please enter your integer primary key and password to log in.

Comment by TZubiri 1 day ago

That's probably an implementation feature that is hidden and not dependable if it exists at all.