Email address transferred to a new account

Purpose

The purpose of this KB article is to explain what might cause the email notification specified above to be received in your inbox, and how to address concerns when this happens.

Diagnosis

• You log in to your Bitbucket Cloud account using your email address

• You then receive the following email in your inbox with the subject line "[Bitbucket] Email address transferred to a new account":

  1 2 3 4 Important information from Bitbucket One of the confirmed email addresses associated with (WorkspaceName) was removed because someone else verified ownership of the address on a different account.

• A likely symptom of this email is that you can no longer see any repositories present in your workspace within the UI, yet these repositories are still able to have GIT operations performed on them

Procedure

The most likely root cause for this email being received is that you have attempted to log in to your Bitbucket Cloud workspace using your email alias instead of your primary email address.

To provide some context, the differences between a primary email address and an email alias are as follows:

• Primary email addresses are used for login purposes and are strictly tied to a singular workspace, this means that they cannot be associated with any other workspaces

• Email aliases cannot be used for login purposes and are not strictly tied to a singular workspace, this means they can be used to sign up for a new workspace

Therefore, when you attempt to sign in to your account using an email alias:

• As the email alias has no strict ties to a given workspace - instead of allowing you to log in, it will bring you to a sign-up page instead

• If this sign-up page is completed, a new workspace will be created and the email alias will become the primary email address for this new workspace

• You will now be logged into this new workspace, however, as this is a new workspace there will not be any repository data associated with it yet

• The old workspace with your data still exists, however, it now no longer has an email alias - as the email alias is now associated with the new workspace

• This explains the text from the email - an email address associated with your workspace (in this case the alias) was used to create a new workspace, therefore, it was claimed for usage

To verify/fix this problem, you will need to follow the steps below:

1. Execute the following git command in a terminal window to view the list of your remote connections, the output will tell you the correct workspaceID that holds your repository data in the following format:

   1 2 > git remote -vvv username@bitbucket.org/workspaceID/reposlug.git

2. If you are not aware of the primary email address associated with your workspace, you can run the following command to list your git config - this will show the email addresses that are associated with your various accounts:

   1 2 3 > git config --list user.name=John Doe user.email=example@example.com

3. Once you have this workspaceID/email address, first compare the workspaceID to the workspaceID reported in your settings by navigating to Workspace Settings > General

4. Next, you can compare the email address by clicking on your avatar in the top-right corner of the screen - this will show the email address associated with the workspace that you are currently logged into

5. If you have verified that both of these differ, you have a couple of options to proceed further:

   a) Simply ignore this new workspace and log in using the correct primary email address to access your repository data

   b) Raise a support ticket or raise a community support ticket to delete the erroneously created workspace and/or associate the correct primary email address with your workspace so that it may be used for login purposes