Managing your email addresses

This page explains why it's important to ensure all email addresses associated with your Overleaf account are kept up-to-date.

Your primary email address is an extremely important piece of information that you provide when registering for an Overleaf account but, for the reasons noted below, you are also encouraged to add one or more secondary email addresses to your Overleaf account. We explain why Overleaf asks you to provide email addresses, what they are used for and how to manage them via your Overleaf Account Settings page.

Your primary email address is important

The primary email address associated with your Overleaf account is important because:

• This is the email address you can use to log in with your Overleaf-specific password.

• This is the email address that your collaborators will see when you accept a sharing invitation or join a group subscription.

• This is the email address that will be sent security and collaboration notifications from Overleaf.

Ensuring that your primary email address is one that you can access and that can receive emails from Overleaf is an important part of keeping your account secure.

If you have an old or inaccessible email account as your primary email address, you risk losing access to your Overleaf account, or losing track of which Overleaf account you have saved important documents under.

While you can configure your account to allow login using institutional single sign-on (SSO), ORCID, or Google, only your primary email address can be used to log in using the Log in with your email option.

If you need to reset the Overleaf password associated with your primary email address, you can request that a password reset link be sent to your primary email address using the password reset request form.

Because the password reset link will be sent to your primary email address, it is important to designate an email that you can access and that is able to receive emails from Overleaf.

Secondary email addresses are helpful

Adding one or more secondary email addresses to your Overleaf account is helpful for several reasons:

• If you lose access to your account and your primary email address, your secondary emails provide a way of verifying the ownership of your Overleaf account. Note that this is true only for secondary emails added after March 22, 2024.

• Adding secondary email addresses to your Overleaf account prevents you from accidentally creating additional Overleaf accounts using those emails.

• Secondary email addresses may allow you to enroll in an institutional Overleaf Commons subscription, or log in to your Overleaf account using institutional SSO.

• If you are invited to collaborate on a project via a secondary email, you will be notified about this on your Projects dashboard.

Changing email addresses associated with your account

For Overleaf accounts that are not managed by an organization, you can add email addresses and change your primary email address in your user settings.

To do this, you'll need to first add a new email address by clicking Add another email.

You can then provide your email address, optionally specifying the institution affiliated with that address if applicable.

For email addresses that are not associated with an institutional SSO, after clicking the Add new email button, check your email inbox for the confirmation message and follow the steps in it to confirm your address. (You may need to check in your Spam, Updates or Promotions mail folders for the email.) Email addresses that are associated with an institution that provides single sign-on will trigger a prompt to be shown to log in to the institutional SSO to confirm.

Note that you can only log in to your Overleaf account with an Overleaf-specific password with the primary email address. If you would like to change your login email address, make sure to click on the Make Primary button next to your chosen email address after adding it in Account Settings. Email addresses associated with an institutional single-sign on login option do not need to be set as the primary email address in order to log in with institutional SSO.