I’m actually afraid to even start on trying after reading this. Better continue this discussion there, if you will -->
You’re probably right. For whatever dumb reason, I always thought my email would be displayed. Maybe the private fields should show to ourselves, somehow, so we know they’re actually private and for our eyes only.
I’m back to thinking about this and would appreciate guidance.
We are considering opening up discourse for a community that already has WordPress logins but don’t necessarily want to set up SSO and lose all the great benefits of social logins, invites, spam user checking etc in discourse. Many people (myself included) use a different email addresses for the WordPress site than we do for our other logins around the web including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc.
So far we’ve been able to tightly control the discourse user accounts, because they are all staff, but once we open up discourse for public logins to our wider community and invite folks to start logging in, we will start getting a divergence between the email addresses people use in wordpress and in discourse. This will bring difficulties with communicating with folks (sending them multiple copies of our newsletters etc) as well as generally with having insight into our community and who’s signing in and participating actively.
So I have returned to thinking that it would be very useful to allow people to add one or more backup email addresses in a comma separated list, or to be able to add it for them. And they can then log in via whatever method or email address they desire and still be able to get in and be identified as the same user, and as long as one of them matches with their WordPress account then we’re golden! The code we write to connect the accounts and pull user info and activity would look for a match across all the user’s email addresses.
One address would of course still need to be established as the primary email that they use to get notifications form Discourse.
Agreed – we still need this too. People still try to email in to Discourse but use the wrong sending address (so get error messages), and hate Discourse (and become more reluctant to adopt it) as a result because they have no way to define multiple addresses. 
To get people started thinking, here’s what we do on our directory system. It requires some narrative of course to explain what “primary” means.
And here is Google’s for good measure:
Display:
Clicking Edit for “Other emails” takes you to this:
Here is how citrix does it, for “alternate email” purposes in case something goes wrong with your main email address. Also interestingly has a field for providing a twitter handle. Nice popup link for “Why we ask” as well.
Of all these, I think I like @gerhard’s facebook model best. Add as many emails as you need that can be used to log in or email from or for SSO, and choose the “primary one” that gets the notifications.
This has now become an urgent priority for my communities and we’d like to have it ASAP. What can we do to make it happen? (besides moving hosting to discourse.org/buy, @codinghorror 
)
One way of making progress here is producing complete and comprehensive UI mock ups for the entire system proposed
Sounds good - I’ll see what I can do on this.
I discussed our plans above which we are starting to move forward on.
As one of the many users @downey was referring to, I’d love to see something like this in my Discourse preferences:
In our case, email addresses are not editable in Discourse, since they’re provided by SSO. If we weren’t using SSO, then editing alternate emails could be done via a text area with one address per line.
For us, the primary need is to accept new posts via email from alternate email addresses, so users don’t need to worry about which account they’re using to email the community.
Has there been any progress on this feature request? We are having several uses that email in requests form multiple addresses and get frustrated having to switch accounts all the time.
Regarding this use case:
What should happen after you’ve sent a new reply in with your non-primary email address? Should that email also be subscribed to the thread now? As far as I can tell, that would get messy.
My suggestion would be that whenever you send in a new post using your non-primary email, you get a confirmation email back from Discourse saying:
Your post, sent from jane-social@example.com has been received and published. Please note however that you will only receive updates on your primary email, which is listed as jane@example.com.
[quote=“erlend_sh, post:26, topic:16328”]
My suggestion would be that whenever you send in a new post using your non-primary email, you get a confirmation email back from Discourse[/quote]
I like it! 
Thanks for waking up this topic - it’s not a huge issue for our community but does come up from time to time.
If you wanted to send a reply to the alternate email address the first time it is used as a heads up, that’d be okay. But, I’d think a reply every time I used my alternate email address would be more annoying than helpful. Also, maybe avoid promising the post has been published (e.g., it might be held for moderation or sitting in a spam queue):
Your post, sent from jane-social@example.com has been received and will be treated as if it came from your primary email, which is listed as jane@example.com. Any future posts from this address will be treated the same. Please note however that you will only receive updates on your primary email.
The ultimate approach would hold onto declined emails for a day, supporting a workflow like (1) Bob emails a post, (2) a "post declined. we don’t know you. if you’re using an alternate email you can add it here, (3) Bob clicks the link & adds his alternate email address, (4) Discourse says “do you want to post the message you just sent from that address?” and Bob says yes.
But I’d be happy just to be able to include alternate emails in my profile and have Discourse treat any messages from those addresses as if they came from my primary email.
This has also become a requirement for us, also to make it easier for users to reply to notifications/start threads without remembering which email address they have to send from as has been discussed before, but mostly to allow users to log-in with whatever service they want, and almost certainly end up logged into their account.
Definitely, I think the most use this feature would get in our instance is from employees who have a ‘true’ email in the auth system (such as lmcardle@mo.co) but also an alias they use everywhere (such as leo@mo.co). Making users not have to remember which their primary on Discourse is, and not annoying them about having sent an email from the ‘wrong’ address, would be very benefitial for us.
The one area which I haven’t seen any discussion around is around merging multiple accounts owned by the same user. It would be great to, after a user has verified they own an address they want to add as a secondary email, but before that address is actually added as a secondary email, check if any accounts exist with that email, and if they do, prompt the user asking if they want to change the owner of any posts owned by that user to themselves, and add all post/category notification levels from the other user. If they accept, Discourse would go ahead and make the ownership and notification level changes, delete the other account, and add the secondary email. If they decline, Discourse informs the user it can’t add the secondary email.
It would also be useful if this merging function could be easily called from a plugin, since for us the addition of secondary emails is going to be done automatically through our auth system.
Hello,
I’m new to discourse.
The idea seems pretty useful. I didn’t understand this:
It would also be useful if this merging function could be easily called from a plugin, since for us the addition of secondary emails is going to be done automatically through our auth system.
