The Trello / Atlassian one email, two accounts problem
I received a notification alerting me that my email address was being used for two different Trello accounts, warning me that I will lose data if I don’t take action, but taking action appeared to be challenging.
Like a lot of people I have been using Trello for years. When Atlassian bought Trello they wanted to everyone to migrate their Trello account to be an Atlassian account. Somewhere in this process I ended up with two accounts. One was empty, one was not.
On the 15th January I received an email with the title ‘Action required: There’s an issue with your Trello account’.
“You or an organization admin changed your Atlassian + Trello account email to (redacted business Google workplace email address). This email address is already in use by a different Trello account that is not linked to Atlassian. This means there are now two separate Trello accounts that use the same email address to log in.
This situation can cause account access and content permission problems. To prevent these issues, you can do a few things:
- Change the email address associated with either your Atlassian or Trello account
- Transfer your Trello boards from one account to the other
- Delete either account, if you no longer intent to use it
If no action is taken, the email address of the Trello account that is not linked to Atlassian will change, which could result in possible loss of access. For help with logging in or other questions, visit our help page.”
The problem
If I tried to log in using my Google-linked workplace Google Workplace business domain I got through to all my Trello boards (via Atlassian).
If I tried to log into my ‘other’ Atlassian account with the same email address so I could merge accounts, I was shown an error message stating ‘This account doesn’t have a password set – perhaps you normally log in with Google or SSO? If you’re stuck, choose ‘Can’t log in?’
The problem I faced was figuring out how to log in using my Google-linked workplace Google Workplace business domain email address when it was linked to my active Trello account.
The fix
I opened a different browser that wasn’t logged into my workplace Google account and tried to log in at https://trello.com
I entered my email address but no password and clicked the login button. It’s important to note that I did not follow the ‘log in with a Google account’ prompt that popped up.
The login failed because I didn’t enter a password. This failure is a part of the process. So I clicked the ‘can’t log in’ link and was taken to a password reset page. Here I again ignored the ‘sign in with Google’ prompt and entered my email address.
When the password reset email arrived I copied the link and went to another new browser. I pasted in the link and was prompted to enter a new password, which I did. After I logged in with the new password I went straight to account settings and changed the email address on the account.
This appears to have fixed the problem. So I still have two Trello accounts, but will ignore one of them.
This solution works well because it is a bad idea to delete the secondary account in case any permissions or card features rely on it. These kind of work arounds can be a bit of a nightmare, so I hope I’ve helped with this blog post.
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Last Updated on February 18, 2023
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