Users do not receive email notifications if their public profile should not display an email address

[cmeessen]

The email address used for notifying users about events in the RSD is using the address that is displayed on the public profile. If a users wants to have a public profile page, but does not want to display an email address on that page, they will not be able to receive mail notifications.

A solution is to let the user choose the email address they want to use for mail notifications. This could be a dropdown in the Profile settings, listing:

• each email address from login_for_account associated with the user account
• the email address from the public profile

[ewan-escience]

This could be a dropdown

I think it should be a free field, with the help of a dropdown, since you never know what email address the user might want to use.

[cmeessen]

I suggest to use the oldest login_for_account as the default mail address.

[dmijatovic]

@cmeessen Currently we do not show email address from profile on the public profile page, as far as I can see. Maybe we should do that in the future?

I see number of use cases for email address:

• Contact email shown in public profile. We do not do that currently.
• Email for notifications from RSD. This email can be different from public contact email.
• We need option for user to opt-out of the notification emails as wel not providing the public contact email

I propose to create two email fields in user_profile table and explain use of these fields to the user on the profile page:

• public_email or contact_email: "This email will be shown on your profile. Leave empty if you do not want email to be shown."
• notifications_email: "This email is used to send you notifications about changes relevant to you. Leave empty if you do not want to receive notifications from RSD".

Currently we inject email from first login_for_account entry into email_address of profile. With new approach we should inject email from login_for_account into notification_email field. In this case contact_email field should be provided by user.

What do you think about this approach?