Validation failed: Primary email has already been taken when trying to handle Gmail dot variants or add secondary emails

[ted (Ted Johansson)]

Hello, @dennisjbr!

@dennisjbr

When an external user sends an email to the incoming mail handler using a Gmail “dot” variant (e.g., user.name@gmail.com) but their registered forum account is the non-dotted primary version (username@gmail.com), the incoming mail handler crashes with an unhandled exception: ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid (Validation failed: Primary email has already been taken).

This sounds like a bug indeed. As the error message says, we do know these e-mails are the same. I’ll have a look at this tonight if I get some free time.

@dennisjbr

Furthermore, attempting to resolve this by adding the dotted variant as a secondary email to the user profile—either via the UI or the Rails Console model layer using UserEmail.create!—fails with the exact same validation loop error. The only workaround is a raw SQL injection into the database, bypassing ActiveRecord.

I think you can disable this behaviour by setting the normailize_emails site setting to false. But there’s a risk that in the e-mail reply path outlined above, a new account would be created. I haven’t looked into the code.