User changed email address, shows up as new account rather than changed original

[jacob.richard]

My company's email addresses have changed due to a merger. 

Admins are using the "Suggest Changes" button to tell users to update their email address associated with their JIRA account. 

Unfortunately when JIRA users change their email addresses in this fashion, it triggers a request for them to be added to the JIRA project as a NEW separate user with the new email address, rather than simply updating their original account with the new email address.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It sounds like your users are not changing their email addresses, but creating new accounts with new email addresses.

You need to ask them to change the email addresses on their Atlassian accounts (or do it for them if you are using managed accounts, or your company directory)

Your admins also should stop using "suggest changes", that's completely the wrong tool to do this.

[jacob.richard]

Funny thing is that it works when the account their changing to is unmanaged. I think the problem is that the account their changing to has saml enabled (verified domain)

[jacob.richard]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- I cant tell them to go to id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/email now because the other account has already been created.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The managed accounts are the problem here - your site admins have been creating new accounts instead of changing the existing ones.  You'll need to get them to stop that, and have them edit the existing accounts.

[jacob.richard]

Its like
old account = not managed no saml
new account = managed and saml (domain is owned by our parent company)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Your users should go into their old accounts, and change the email to the new one, not have your company set up a new account.  

If you change the email address to one that is under a managed domain, then you're converting the account from personal to managed (the individual loses the ability to change some of the properties, because the account now belongs to the managing organisation)

[jacob.richard]

They cant change the email to the new one because an account for the new one was already created.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, your admins should not have created the new account.  You can still delete it.

[Eldon Wong]

We had the same thing happen when we tried to switch everyone in our organization to new email addresses.

When users accidentally create a new account, we had to get them to do the following steps. Maybe there's a quicker way around this, but these are the steps that seemed to work for everyone in our organization.

In the new account they created by accident, change the email address to something temporary.

1. For the accidentally created account, make sure they have a password set.
   1. Go to https://id.atlassian.com/login/resetpassword to send a recovery link and follow instructions to set a password
2. Login to their accidentally created account by using that new password
3. Change the email of this accidentally created account to something temporary, maybe a new Gmail they created by going here: https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/email
4. Follow the emails to verify the email address change
5. This new accidentally created account should now be associated to a temporary email address and no longer be associated under the email you actually want to use.

Now that there are no accounts associated with the new email address your org is changing to, you should be able to follow the proper instructions to update users email addresses. I believe this page should work: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloudkb/change-atlassian-account-email-addresses-969508513.html