Why are there two columns referencing the user email address?

[Tobias]

Hello together, 

just noticed that in the confluence table there are two columns for the user email address. One column has the email address in lower case (lower_email_address / email_address), the other one has the same value but with capital letters. Where is the difference in the use of the two fields?

I want to change the value for some employees, so I asked myself the question.

Best

Tobias

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

This sounds like you are looking in the database at the cwd_user table.

First, the standard warning - stop looking at the database, it is a complex mess, built as a data store for the application, not as a database.  You're going to find reading it complex, and you are almost certainly never going to write to it directly (never write to an Atlassian database unless directed to by support.  You will almost certainly break it.  If you do it, support will tell you to take a full database backup first, and have the application shut down when you do it - writing to an active system at best means loss of data, and at worst, will corrupt it beyond usage)

But to answer the question, the two email addresses are a display address and an actual address.  The "lower" one is the strictly valid address - email addresses are not really supposed to use uppercase, and there are a couple of older email server systems (still in use) that won't accept them.  Most systems that work with email simply ignore capitalisation nowadays, and that's what Confluence is doing here.  It's quicker and cheaper to store and read a lowercase email than it is to read mixed case and convert to lowercase every time you need to use the email. 

[Tobias]

Hey @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

thanks for your reply, that is currently what I wanted to know. 

Best 

Tobias 

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hi @Tobias

Can you provide more context about the table? It's hard to make any assumption about things that happen within your Confluence instance as a community that has no access. :) At the moment, I assume that you have a table on a Confluence page someone created. Or is the table something Confluence created?

Best, Max

[Tobias]

Hey @Max Foerster - K15t 

I am talking about the default cwd_user table which in my case has to columns referencing both to the email adress.