Why must my E-mail address be unique?

Early on, WordPress.com allowed users to create several user accounts using the same email address. Now, when we try to look up a user by their email address we sometimes get several users instead of one. This makes it impossible to integrate certain new features into WordPress.com.

We’re not going to tell you all of the great things we’re able to do when there is only one user per email address (that would spoil many great surprises to come) but take our word for it: it’s worth it.

If you arrived here because you have several accounts using the same email address, you should remedy this as soon as possible. You have several options.

First, you can make one account an Administrator of each of your blogs and discard the other accounts. You will have the benefit of being able to access each of your blogs with a single sign-on.

The single sign-on method is perfect unless you require separate accounts for some reason. In that case, you’re welcome to keep separate accounts. Each account should have its own email address.

There is a trick that works with Gmail (and possibly other email providers) to let you use one email address as though it were several different addresses. Gmail lets you add “+something” to your mailbox name and still get your mail. For example, joe@gmail.com and joe+wordpress@gmail.com and joe+secretblog@gmail.com each look like different addresses to our system but they all route mail to the same inbox: joe@gmail.com.

Finally, you can leave your accounts just the way they are. You will lose the ability to reset the password without knowing the username. Also, all but the earliest account will lose the benefits of certain new features we have planned.

We apologize if this seems like more trouble than it’s worth. When you see the new features we are able to roll out because of this enforcement, we hope you’ll see the value.