What should you do if two people shared an e-mail address?

Question

What should you do if two people share an e-mail address? I want to invite a relative to WikiTree, but his e-mail is shared with his wife. How does that work?

Comments

Zachary, is his wife a WikiTree member?

Answer 1

Hi Zachary.  I don't recall ever seeing an official policy on this, but you could only have one WikiTree account associated with an e-mail address.  If they both want to be participants, with separate accounts, they would need to add another address.  (They could each have their separate profiles without having separate accounts.)  FWIW, I share e-mail with my wife too, but she is not a participant, so we have no conflict.  If she ever decided to put up a little data of her own, she could get into my account, and the site would have no way of knowing whose fingers are on the keyboard.  So the arrangement requires a little trust on my part.

Comments

I should have also mentioned that I do use a separate address for genealogy stuff, rather than the account for our day-to-day traffic, so the only thing she may do with the WT account is look at the e-mail to see whether anybody disliked something I said in G2G!

Answer 2

Do they use Gmail, by chance?  If so, I can give you a trick to make one Gmail account have separate email addresses.

Comments

Actually, yes, it is a Gmail account. What's the trick?

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https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html

So if their email address was TheSmiths@Gmail.com, they could have one of them use TheSmiths+Bob@Gmail.com and the other use TheSmiths+Mary@Gmail.com.  To WikiTree, those would be different email addresses, but they would both send to their shared account.

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That's super cool!

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I tried to enter the e-mail address the way described, but this error message comes up:

Sorry, the e-mail address does not look valid. A valid e-mail address is required for _____ to login.

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Wikitree must not like the plus symbol.

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Another way to do it is with a period, e.g. Smiths.Bob@gmail. That will work.