# About the idea: IDENTITY = EMAIL

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-idea-identity-email/34642
**Category:** Site feedback
**Tags:** email
**Created:** [October 18, 2015, 12:41am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-idea-identity-email/34642 "2015-10-18T00:41:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 7

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### Author: ![jd2066](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@jd2066](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jd2066)
#### Post date: [October 18, 2015, 9:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-idea-identity-email/34642/7 "2015-10-18T21:26:43Z")

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> [@sam](#):
>
> > [@jd2066](#):
> >
> > I suppose in short, I can say while I don’t think using an email address as an identity is a good idea, it appears that in certain situations Discourse has no other way to identify a user.
> 
> I have absolutely no idea what you are proposing … if you want to log in with your username you can.

That is true and I do login that way.  
I was saying that for some things, Discourse does use email as the identity only such as SSO:  
“Discourse uses emails to map external users to Discourse users” - [Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-single-sign-on-for-discourse/13045) and it seems like there is not really another option.  
Though thinking about it, if the user names on the SSO Source Site don’t change then Discourse could map users based on the username instead of email.

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