It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change (help.openai.com)

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.

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.

[dead]

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 Always superseded by a new fire.

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.

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...

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

Allowing users to change emails is surprisingly tricky:

- if they verified their email, are they allowed to change it?

- if so, can they use the new email for anything as long as it’s not verified, or does it stay in pending state? for how long?

- if it’s in a pending state, can someone signup with a "pending state" email?

- does the email change need to be validated by sending a validation email to the previous email addresses?

- once changed, can an email address be reused for another account? That’s a dangerous one but if you don’t support it you end up shamed on HN with "OpenAI doesn’t allow me to create an account with an email address that used to be associated with an account on their platform but isn’t anymore"

I’m probably missing 10 more bullet points.

I bet most comments in this thread didn’t think beyond "UPDATE accounts SET email = $1"