Users cannot be looked up using email IDs

[imran_patharwat]

Do we have any setting that can enable users to be able to look up other users using their email IDs?

This is a common problem users face because they do know email IDs of people who they work with, but not the usernames in communities (which are way too unpredictable sometimes). Maybe lookup should not show all matching email IDs but search for an exact one.

[karolinalinda]

Hi @imran_patharwat,

Unfortunately, there's no separate setting in permissions that will help you achieve that.

We needed to grant the following setting to our Moderators, so they can actually look for email domains or full emails:

Then you can easily search for emails:

Does this help?

Karolina

[MarkAtTruth]

JX Communities when doing an @mention would locate a user based on their email address (on top of username, name and possibly other aspects of their profile) if you knew it. If you're an external community @imran_patharwat I'd be careful on this and ensure that email addresses aren't visible to other members in search results. I prefer in most communities to interact anonymously. I know a fair amount of shady people scrape Atlas for contact info and then send direct emails to my work email or via linked in with things completely unrelated to my role.

If you're an internal community employees probably know each other's email addresses so it's probably not a problem. 

Honestly I miss this functionality from Jive as it allowed me to see when people had multiple community accounts. Example: @fluffycat2021

Username:
Fluffycat21 (Fluffycat2021@gmail.com)
Fluffycat2021 (Fluffycat2021@yahoo.com)
Fluffycat.21 (Fluffycat2021@hotmail.com) 

While these could be possibly different users on the community I think some people might forget they have an account or change emails over time and then register again with a new email address that might be similar to a previous one. When people ask for their accounts to be merged, discovery of people with multiple accounts is helpful with searching via @mentioning However I can see this potentially as a privacy issue and a way for people to guess someone's email address and cold email them.

If I @Mention jon.doe and it searches email addresses in addition to usernames and I see search results like those below I'm going to know that the usernames that are listed below have an email address that matches jon.doe@something.___ or jon.doe____@____.___. It's good but it is also a potential issue. 

Username:
jon.doe (jon.doe@gmail.com)
unexpecteddelay (jon.doe@yahoo.com)
username2020 (jon.doe@domain.com)

[karolinalinda]

hi @MarkAtTruth,

In our case, all Admins and Moderators can search for and see user emails. We also have this situation from time to time that one user has 2 or 3 accounts. With Khoros search, it's super easy to look for all them based on the user real name. We don't use private messaging, but sometimes need to contact our Community members through email.

I would never grant this option globally, to all users. This is definitely a privacy matter.

Have a great week,

Karolina

[imran_patharwat]

Thank you @karolinalinda for helping out. However, my concern is not about admins or moderators. We too have enabled this permission for looking up internally and that is a must feature for admins/mods as email IDs mere serve better associations with individuals.

@MarkAtTruthThank you, I agree with all that you mentioned. You have helped out with all possible scenarios. However, I do have a use case here:

"x@abc.com is our external user in our community and so are y@abc.com and z@abc.com. All employees with abc.com can lookup each other's email IDs in their internal directory. There is a post in community where x wants to @ mention y and z but it is impossible without knowing their usernames."

Here, I want to emphasize the fact that the user does not want to find people but he already knows who to tag. Only problem is he does not know the usernames. Here, allowing a user to see if there is an exact match to looked up email is reasonable option to provide.

Please share your opinion.