It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change

No mention of the reason why. Seems like a foundation feature. Ran into trouble more than once by their bad auth system.

Oof that's bad. Makes it seem like ChatGPT is really more hacked together than we all want to admit.

My five cents for a guess: they've used the email as an index somewhere, which massive amount of data now depends on and they keep pushing forward the need of migrating away from that because it'll be painful and take long time.

Seeing that their product keeps improving I’m actually fascinated by that level of discipline.

Total focus on the main product, which is the API.

I’d say the consumer front end is more of an afterthought. It also seems like something they want to get rid of at some point so that they have to deal with the resellers like Microsoft did in the 90s with MS Windows

Maybe they could use Claude and speed up that development.

And yet it is still better than Gemini’s front end

I’d say it’s a rookie mistake, but they’re a half-trillion dollar company, so maybe I _should_ use email address as an id?

Yeah, but imagine the first engineers at ChatGPT back in 2021, some thrown together group of people who knew frontend the best from OpenAI, a research lab, to create a quick prototype UI for chatting with a text generating ML model. Of course they'll take some shortcuts, that's to be expected. All of this is just guesses though, but seen similar things play out many times. Of course, at one point someone needs to step in and pause for a moment to plan ahead for a bit, but depending on the leadership, it isn't always so easy to do.

No doubt there’s a lesson in there, but I don’t think it’s a technical one.

Create table account (email varchar(255) primary ....

This is probably one of those tickets on the backlog that is constantly kicked down the road. Always superseded by a new fire.

ChatGPT is just a consumer of their identity/auth system though, same as their core product - the API. Considering ChatGPT came much later, it seems irrelevant.

But ChatGPT told me to run that, so I did.

Philips Hue also doesn't allow for an email change, and they've been around longer than OpenAI. And if you want to delete your Philips Hue account to create a new one with a new email there's considerable pain involved if you have a house with many Hue products.

Authentication to the API platform seems like an important part of that product.

Neither does Replit, and your Replit email has to match your GitHub if you want the two to talk. I guess this is what running and not walking looks like.

Change the provider, and problem is solved.

Or phone number. My phone is linked to one in another country. I’ve been here for 3 years.

You're kidding ?

I created an google account, use it on my android smartphone and buy some app, many years ago.

It's 2026 and Google still doesn't allow email change.

I'm on board with this, imagine the headaches and development costs of adding this feature and 100 other QoL features. It would absorb energy and complexity budget that could be spent on core product features.

That's what happen when the future is vibe coded...

We have just cut the costs of software development by 90% didn't we?

This kind of stuff is simply a result to certain companies having a userbase bigger than they maybe even want (especially when offering a free tier).

They can get away with not implementing even basic stuff, becauase their core feature is all 99% of the users even care about.

Phone either, I’ve moved countries and no longer have access to the phone number I signed up with. I was hoping they’d address this before that number came up for reassignment but maybe not at this rate.

Maybe they used ChatGPT 1.0 to vibe code it

HN doesn’t allow you to delete your account or erase/overwrite any of your old comments

Even if that's were true, I would be very surprised if this caused a loss of even 0.0000001% annual revenue. Going to need more 9's in that number.

edit: If you don't understand why this is actually important, realize that they're burning billions. They don't focus their devs on things that generate revenue, or the light will go out.

This is a hilarious take.

Car company makes innovative new car engine for their vehicle. A user wants to get a replacement key made for the vehicle, but company doesn't have the process in place to make replacement keys:

Are you fascinated by this hypothetical companies level of discipline? Or would you consider it negligent and inept?

What do you mean? I've changed my email on my Google account a bunch of times.

They used to not even need an email.

You can use 3rd party apps/tools to get around this, FWIW.

I use OpenHue on Linux. On iOS I've not had much luck finding a quality app, however a long time ago I did find a good one for Android...(I just don't remember the name, sorry.)

The account login crap is ridiculous, considering you don't even need internet to use their stuff. The lack of needing a login was the whole reason I bought into the ecosystem to begin with.

Steam also has usernames that can't be changed. They added changing the actual email address associated with your account, but your original email address as account name is frozen forever, for old accounts.

Since 2003!

Your email is your identity. If they allow you to change your email, what they should refer you by, your passport number? Was kind of easier in the times of usernames, but these are long gone

Nor changing the phone number. But who would ever need to change their phone number, right?

They should use the integer primary key of the users table, of course.

Google only allows email changes if you didn't create it with a gmail address. When I found this out years ago I immediately scrapped that account and created a new one with a non gmail address before there was too much on the original account.

OpenAI has no idea what is the cause of the problem, but once OpenAI has built a general intelligent system, they will ask it for a way to fix this bug.

(for those who don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1886s (31:26 - 32:13)).

Maybe email is a primary key in OpenAI's database somewhere? Half joking :D

At some point, it must be worth it to implement this just for the sake of their customer support team alone.

Then again, they have LLMs that can just deflect all "change email" related questions to an FAQ article containing the "wontfix" information...

That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?

The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.

Isn't that in violation of GDPR?

All software is more hacked together than we want to admit.

Why don't they just ask AI to implement it?

I don't think their API is their core product. The chat application is not only used by more people, but it drives development of the API.

that's by design

That's wild. I guess I've never experienced it because I still have the email attached to my nearly 15+ year old Steam account.

Some tangently related anecdata: VRChat has a pretty strict email-changing policy. You need to confirm you own both the VR account and the original email account. Reasonable, but can be tricky if you don't have access to the original email anymore. I was able to navigate it but yeah, it's not always simple.

Password change also requires you to use forgot password flow too, rather than a straightforward change password button.

I guess development teams are all focused on feature delivery and research.

Most services I know allow changing both.

That's probably an implementation feature that is hidden and not dependable if it exists at all.

To which one? Claude doesn't support it either [1], and Gemini is tied to a Gmail address to begin with.

[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8452276-how-do-i-chan...

Nah, that’s too 1985.

Because client doesn’t know it, inserts can be slow in cross-db environment.

Guid is always better (can be client generated), and modern guid versions can be ordered chronologically

We do let you change it; under your account setting there is a email with an edit button next to it. And it shouldn’t need to match your GitHub email.

Perhaps there is some weirdness if you’ve signed up with GitHub. Feel free to email me and we can take a look: amjad@repl.it

According to Gemini, it's because OpenAI uses the email as the unique identifier of the user. But if that were the case, it's probably an week's project for a single engineer at most. I thought there was a better reason for this like some security measure for such a fast growing company, it never occurred to me that the reason could be so simple

Yep, same here. Fortunately they don't seem to use it for anything yet, somewhat begging the question of why it's there in the first place. (It doesn't need to be stored in a user-visible way if the only purpose is as a poor/annoying "proof of humanity" against sockpuppet accounts).

Update: I just checked, out of curiosity – seems to be gone now?

You cannot change your google email itself .. because there's no other reference to identify you with them. But you can use your email as the "inbox" for all other services. OpenAI doesn't have an "inbox" .. they accept other "inboxes" so they should allow you to change it.

Funny how this vanished from the main page faster than hot cakes.

Saying from experience getting flagged previously while reporting changes in OpenAI’s policy regarding medical and law advice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777828

It was used to geofence access to some countries a few years ago, if I remember correctly.

Drives more revenue too. But I still think in the long run, APIs will bring more revenue.

The model might be fine (I have questions, but let's assume it's reasonable), but I don't think anyone could use the UI for more than a few minutes and not realize it was a hack job.

For one fun one, on mobile web (android/chrome) you can't insert a space in the middle of a "word" you created by deleting the space between two words. The deletion is immediately reverted by some JS abomination.

It's one thing to call that an unimportant bug, but it calls into question a whole chain of decisions leading to that moment, and it's far from an isolated incident. As always there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/463/

That's a good guess .. but I bet they are also paying price for this in support costs .. I'd be curious what percentage of their support tickets are related to this (also the require you to cancel subscription, create a new account, create a new subscription if you want to change a pro account)

> That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?

It requires a Hue bridge, but all the official Hue apps need that too (unless you're using the new Bluetooth support, which very few people are). You shouldn't need any other hardware though.

> The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.

Locally, it doesn't really matter, since everything just goes over the local network. You're definitely correct for remote access though, but I hardly ever need to control my lights remotely.

No. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

>Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:

>for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information;

dang will randomize your username on request though, which is compliant. Everything else on your profile you can delete yourself.

Thanks, but.. this was true as of some months ago. And I definitely was told by support that my [personal] email couldn’t connect to my [consulting] GitHub email account. I re-arranged quite a lot of my tech life to connect the two, per Replit support.

But I’ll double check tomorrow and reach out if I find anything worth sharing.

That might be technically true, but in practice not an issue. I have a Gmail account, so the primary address is fixed because the address is the account, however I use a different address to sign-in, and Google recognises those addresses as being on that account. For pretty much all uses my account has a different email address.

If the car in question were the probably most hot software in town and the user wants to change the photos on their profiles, I'd find it very interesting if they kept the discipline to focus the whole team away from such a low-priority change and into the priority of keeping it the most hot software in town.

Let's keep in mind that OpenAI is a small company (in people terms), and they are fighting toe to toe with Google.

Heck, if they mess up a quarter they are probably dead.

You can use a random numerical ID as PK and let people associate as many authn IDs as they want after logging in with one.

To be clear, we will redact personally identifying information and do other things to prevent someone's past HN activity from causing them any trouble in the future. We certainly don't want to cause anyone any trouble and will do whatever we can to prevent that. Our concern is only to avoid gutting past threads and ruining them for the others who participated in in them and for future readers who may find the content of the discussions interesting.