Creating Multiple HipChat Accounts with One Email Address

[James Strangeway]

I need to be able to create additional HipChat sites for clients, but when entering the new (company name) .HipChat.com with my email address it tells me that I have already created an account with that email address.

[David Maye · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

Currently, you are only able to have one email address tied to one HipChat cloud group. If you want to use the same email address on another account, you will have to deactivate your existing account to free up your email address for the new account.

To deactivate your account:

1. Log into your HipChat group.
2. Select EDIT PROFILE
3. Select DEACTIVATE account in the left side bar
4. Enter in your password to DEACTIVATE your account
5. The email address tied to this account is now freed up to use in another group.

Alternately, you can also change the email address on your old account, which will free up the email address for use on another account. 

To change your email address:

1. Log into your HipChat group.
2. Select EDIT PROFILE
3. Change your email address to another email address that you have access to.

Note: Some group admins will restrict editing of this field. Reach out to the group admin's to make the change.

Also, please don't forget that all HipChat groups have a guest access feature which anyone can join. This is great for quick chats with users not registered to your HipChat group. This feature is explained in detail here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/HIPCHAT/Guest+access

Lastly, we have a feature that allows multiple HipChat accounts to be used in one HipChat client. Please do not confuse multiple accounts within the client with multiple groups tied to one email address, they are different. You can have multiple different accounts (each with a unique email address) logged into a single client, but not one email account/address tied to multiple HipChat groups. More info on multi-accounts feature here: https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/06/08/connecting-multiple-accounts-on-hipchat-is-here/

Hope this clarifies.

Cheers,
-David 

[David Sweet]

Thanks for the info.  As a consultant who may administer two or more HipChat groups, this is restricting.

[tjkarl]

Agreed, being able to administer multiple instances would be helpful without having to use different email addresses.

[SteveK]

This is critical for my company, as a systems integrator we need to support multiple vendors who have HipChat domains (on top of supporting our internal domain). Is there a roadmap to have this implemented?

[George Peden (Slalom)]

This is a serious design flaw and a big reason why we are moving to Slack.  

When is this going to get fixed?

george

[lperry65]

As a freelance developer I'm invited to multiple bitbucket teams belonging to other companies, but I dont seem to be able to be part of the HipChat discusions for those teams. Crazy ! 

[crivers]

Supporting multiple groups under a single email is definitely something we're considering for the future, although we don't currently have a specific timeline for it.

In the meanwhile, one option (depending on your email provider) is to use email suffixes. For example, if you use Gmail and your email is david@gmail.com, you can use "david+somecompany@gmail.com" and it will be delivered to your inbox.

[rnunez]

Same problem here =/ 

[Chris Henderson]

Same need here.  Keep getting organizational blowback about Slack allowing this.

[John Bevan]

FYI: One potential hack if your mail provider supports plus addressing (exchange doesn't; gmail does; see wiki for others (sort by address modifier descending to see those that do at the top)) is to trick HipChat into thinking you have different mail addresses.  e.g. say my email address is `John@example.com`, I could set up HipChat accounts using the below addresses:

• `John+MegaCorpLtd@example.com`
• `John+AnotherCompany@example.com` 

What goes between the plus (+) and the at (@) is up to you; I'd advise the company's initials or a short version of the name so it's easy to remember which is which.

I've tested this with my gmail account and can confirm the trick definitely works.  One option then is even if your provider doesn't support it you can create a gmail account for this specific purpose (but not one for every tenant you have to access, which could be a nightmare).

[Michael Kasher]

This a major need for our company.   We were testing out Hipchat and Slack.   Without this feature, we have no choice but to move to slack.