Obviously I’m testing with several accounts I created just for this purpose (using virtual machines and other browsers and too much time testing 
).
I think I resolved the issue on my end. It had nothing to do with Discourse.
There’s a bit of code in my site’s footer that checks – for users whose email has been verified – if they are logged in to Discourse already and, if they aren’t, logs them in. This informs Discourse of users’ info, even if they don’t visit the forum itself.
Alas, this chunk was being accidentally cached so, of course, it wasn’t firing because it had been cached when no user had logged in. My bad! 
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This is probably the best place still to mention that there are cases when Discourse drives me absolutely nuts.
I happen to have several “users” that are not real. Whether they are read-only accounts for a specific hidden category, anonymous beyond the capabilities of Discourse or whatever should not matter. Some of these are automatic and created on the fly as needed (and reused in a queue).
Problem is, they have been added using a “noreply” email. That email does not exist anymore so Discourse is spamming out admin mails saying this email bounced, all the time, for each of these users and the moderators are now starting to go nuts.
Now, if I go in and change that email to an existing no-forward, no-store email, Discourse refuses to do it without sending a mail to said email asking for confirmation… so no changes are made. Anyone see the problem here? 
So I have two options I can think of:
Log in as each user using SSO to force an email change (which hopefully does not require confirmation, haven’t actually tried, would be too tedious).
Go to the preferences of each such user and change email notifications and summary digests to never, ever. And every time a new temporary user gets created, I need to remember to do the same.
Maaaaan. If I as an admin change an email for a user, there is no need to ask the user to confirm the email. Any user will hopefully contact me if I actually messed up which is very unlikely. Besides, these days I just let the users change their emails at will, less trouble for a poor admin. And I understand there is a risk that the user will never be able to login or notify anyone again but obviously they can mail the site help as such.
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Why not use the sync_sso endpoint to fix all the emails via api?
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Not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about the setting “sso overrides email”?
That would only take effect when/if the user actually logs in. So emails would still bounce while the email is wrong.
If you are possibly talking about “POST admin endpoint /admin/users/sync_sso to synchronize an SSO record” that would mean I would have to force one or all users from the SSO software I guess. Given the problems with SSO emails syncing it’s not the first option I would try.
Anyway, because of the problem described earlier in this topic I now have “sso overrides email” off and let users change their emails themselves. So I don’t want to override from SSO anymore.
But all this is missing the point, that the users bouncing mails are generated on the fly, as needed. The easiest way would be to allow a change to the email without authentication (at least for admins - or admins would have a choice).
Side note: I have tried giving an empty email address but the system does not allow for that. I understand the email address is so critical is should not be empty. BUT, if you really give an empty email (at least as an admin), one could assume you know what you are doing.
Just to confuse things more, I actually have users that do not have an email account, only access to a browser. Think refugees here and you might understand why. It is far easier to just allow someone to login and read instructions in their own language than to try and explain to them they need to make a gmail account or something.
In any case, this is theoretical, I doubt many people have the same problem. I would say it’s simply too strict even for admins, IMHO.
(sorry about the reply time, with more free time the world would be perfect)
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That would allow someone to hijack an admin’s account without their knowing. Though your edge case for users without access to email makes some sense, it seems far-fetched to think that admins would be people who don’t have the ability to receive email.
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Admins have email addresses. Not sure where you got the idea they would not have (my bad writing probably ).
The case was for an admin to be able to change other user’s emails without the need to authenticate.
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So I’m trying to do this - the use case is a user has changed their email in the SSO system, however they now can’t log in since there’s another account of theirs that uses their new email address already. SSO refuses to update the email (even though we have sso_overrides_email on) because email addresses must be unique across accounts. I don’t want to delete the account without the SSO record as that has posts associated with it. And if I turn off sso_overrides_email to change the email manually, I can’t make it some broken email since Discourse insists on validating it.
I see there’s a way to merge users but a) it’s a rake task and we’re hosted with Discourse, do I contact support to do that? b) there’s comments about needing to swap the primary and secondary email addresses.
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I’m in the same boat @trs80. Did you ever find out if there is a way to workaround this limitation of the merging?
I’ll have to check my email but support have generally been pretty good with resolving these issues.
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“set it to override emails”
Is this the “auth overrides email” setting?
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Not bad AI, happy with this answer:
AI explainer on auth overrides emails AI
sam:
what does auth overrides email do?
gpt4_bot:
Look up site setting context
Reading context for: auth_overrides_email
The auth_overrides_email site setting in Discourse is responsible for controlling email behavior in relation to external authentication providers. When set to true, this setting does the following:
- It overrides the local email address with the email address provided by the external authentication provider (e.g., SSO, OAuth) upon every user login.
- It prevents the user from making local changes to their email address within their Discourse account settings.
This feature is applicable to all authentication providers configured on the Discourse site. This setting is useful when you want to maintain email consistency and identity verification for users who are logging in through external services.
However, users should exercise caution with this setting, as discrepancies can occur due to the normalization of local email addresses. This means that if there is a difference in how the external system and Discourse format or handle email addresses, it could lead to mismatches or issues with account linking.
The default value for auth_overrides_email is false, meaning that by default, Discourse does not override local emails with external site emails on every login, nor does it prevent users from changing their email addresses.
When this setting is enabled, it affects various user permissions, including the inability to edit email addresses in certain cases, as managed by the site’s guardian and user guardian scripts. Additionally, the setting impacts how email fields are displayed and whether users are given instructions regarding email address changes within the user interface.
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I’m having problems here too. Discourse gets its SSO information from my WordPress site, and auth_overrides_email is enabled.
However, when I update the user’s email address in WordPress, no changes are made on Discourse.
I tried turning auth_overrides_email off, and while that removed the comment that it was managed by an authentication provider, there was never a pencil icon next to the email address, either for me as admin or when impersonating the user (which I did several times before turning the setting off to simulate the login/logout that was suggested above). All I could do was Show the address.
I turned auth_overrides_email back on and changed the address twice more in WordPress (to something else and back to what it should be), with no change.
Suggestions?
I am having the same problem. Is there a way to change the user’s email in the Discourse database? How do I do this from the command line?
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I usually have to enable emails_editable, then disable auth_overrides_email, then change the email.
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If you force them to log out so that they have to log in again does the new email address get passed to Discourse?
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