Users can log in to Crowd using their logins or email addresses. Using email addresses has been introduced in Crowd 4.4 and enabled by default, but you can change these settings.

To change how users log in:

1. Go to your Crowd administration console.
2. Select the Crowd application and switch to the Options tab.
3. Select whether users can log in with email addresses.

Limitations

In some cases, Crowd is unable to verify that the email belongs to the user and won’t allow them to log in by using it. To describe these cases, let’s assume that Crowd is configured with two directories – Directory 1 and Directory 2, defined in that exact order.

Example 1: Ambiguous email ownership

If there are multiple Crowd users with the same email address, none of them will be able to log in.

Example 2: Shadowed email owner

In this example, each of your two directories has a user called John. John from Directory 2 uses an email address john@john.com, while John from Directory 1 uses a different email address. When john@john.com is used during authentication, the user won't be able to log in. This is because John 1 is the canonical user in Crowd and he doesn't use this address. Check out Effective memberships with multiple directories to learn more about canonical and shadowed users.

Example 3: Overlapping emails and usernames

In this example, we have two Crowd users with the same email address. But, for john one, the email address is actually a username.

Crowd first checks the provided value against usernames and only then emails. In this case, Crowd will attempt to log in John 1 as the provided value is his username.