Authentication

Hi, I just ran into the same question this week because Students and Teachers type in invalid eMail-Addresses and then I receive according Error-Mails in the admin mailbox.

Students often simply mistype their addresses in the profile, so an immediate check of the validity would be a good thing to implement.

Sometimes students simply change address without editing/updating their moodle profile.

But there is the Teacher's problem who wants to have his teacher account and his student test account to have the same eMail address.

I was more lucky than you searching for:

forumid:32 "same email address"

The list of possible workarounds and suggestions is quite long (and I haven't finished reading all actually). But I wonder why nobody of the programmers explains WHY uniqueness is checked on the eMail Field and WHY the Moodle Admin is not able to choose uniqueness or not as an option for user creation. This would solve many of the cases I read until now, and even our one.

So here is a partial list of suggestions and workarounds I found. What I did is edit the user table with phpMyAdmin to assign the same eMail address to Teacher and its testaccount, hoping that Moodle will not reject this as inconsistency one day:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=101232#p447747

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93648#p413471

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=91720#p405117

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=52770#p240928

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=7706#p132533

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=22591#p106920

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=4178#p18721

In the latter post of 2003 Martin Dougiamas writes: Currently these are necessary, but there will eventually be admin options to change this.

So I have to check again in my Version 1.9.3+ whether uniqueness can be disabled by the admin.

I will report back, Rosario

Hi Karen,

Rather than trying to have multiple email addresses for each account, how about allowing users to change the email address set when their account was created? Please see Administration > Users > Authentication > LDAP Server.

Dear Karen,

How are you catch up with multiple emails for single account?

I'm posed with the same issue. I made an entry recently in Moodle Tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-19128. What do you think?


I'm maintaining University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia E-Learning that is now converting to Moodle.

Just like in many other universities I've talked to before, students are more likely to favor popular web email e.g. yahoo, gmail etc rather than the university's email. In many occasion students do not check this email often. And many lecturers dislike using the university's. Obviously because of the features gmail and yahoo have.

I would suggest that an alternative email field should be established in the user profile and radioboxes to select which email as main and alternate.

Looking at the core of Moodle, only one email address must be set active. Therefore the radiobox would function to put the main email on the current email field and leave the other email on alternate.

Please comment on this issue, I would like to share this as much as possible with other Moodlers.

This has been reported in MDL-20318 already. Please vote for it there so it gets a priority upgrade.

One way to fix this (as I discovered while playing around on a test installation) is that if the regular expression for the validate_email() function in lib/weblib.php is modified to allow a comma separated list of emails then forum posts, profile updates and account registrations will all be sent to every email address in the list.

Now the way I did it was by commenting out the entire regex and returning true. This is obviously not appropriate for a production site, but I am no regex expert (and just looking at the regex in the file made my eyes hurt).

Here is the function:


function validate_email($address) {

return (ereg('^[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+'.
'(\.[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+)*'.
'@'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+\.'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\./0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+$',
$address));
}



Here is what I did (not good, but gets all the emails sent out):


function validate_email($address) {

/* return (ereg('^[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+'.
'(\.[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+)*'.
'@'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+\.'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\./0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+$',
$address));*/

return true;
}



Now, if a user types in user1@mail.com,user2@aol.com,user3@msn.com all accounts will receive the mail.

If anyone can come up with a modification of the regex to accept a comma separated list, I think this will solve this issue.

This regular expression seemed to work:


function validate_email($address) {

return (ereg('^[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+'.
'(\.[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+)*'.
'@'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+\.'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\./0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+'.
'([,;]\s*'.
'^[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+'.
'(\.[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+)*'.
'@'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\/0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+\.'.
'[-!#$%&\'*+\\./0-9=?A-Z^_`a-z{|}~]+'.
')*',
$address));


}