In 2016 I lost access to some repos on bitbucket after a similar occurrence. I made the mistake of using my (student) university email account to register with bitbucket (it was the primary email account I used for everything at the time). At some point, my university apparently decided to use Atlassian services which completely disabled any ability I had to login to that account. I don't know if linking together all accounts under a domain is just the default behavior from Atlassian or if both this former employer and my university decided to screw people over, but either way it's a stupid situation and unsurprising at this point.
> In this case, I did not even use the company email. I was my personal gmail.
From the Atlassian community page it looks like the Trello account in question was linked to both your personal gmail account and an email account belonging to your former employer. Was that Trello account only for work items for that former employer? Or was it a mixture of both work items for that employer and personal items for you? Or was it just your personal account that happened to have your work email as an alternate email address?
If it was just a work Trello acccount with your former employer, then I'm not sure why you would need access to that Trello account now that you're no longer with that employer. Atlassian is giving you the option of disconnecting your personal gmail from that account so you can create a new one if you want a personal Trello account.
If it was a mixture of work and personal items in the Trello account, then the obvious lesson learned for the future is to not do that.
If it was just your personal Trello account, I don't see why your previous employer would have a problem with telling Atlassian that it's not their account and that the email address in their domain can be removed.
In any case, it doesn't look to me like this situation is Trello's fault. You say in a comment on the Atlassian community page that "It is very evident from the reply that Atlassian favors corporate accounts over individuals", but I don't see that they are favoring either party here. In fact they are refusing to favor either party, by refusing to make a decision--which email the account "really" belongs to--that they should not be making. This is something the two parties involved--you and your former employer--need to work out. It's not something Trello should be deciding. They have no way of knowing which party--you or your former employer--is the "right" owner of this account.
I will try to set some context here. I created my personal account long before Trello was acquired by Atlassian. It did not have any SSO at that point and the login was with username and password. At some point, while working on a side project and to share it with a teammate, I attached a secondary email to my account and created few boards under it. This email was my companies email @company.com
The multiple account login used to work the same way it works for github now. The boards were very clearly labeled under the email/username they were created and clearly had the ownership well defined. As soon as I left the company and my email was disabled, all the boards under that email disappeared from my account. This was expected and kept using my primary email (i always used to login with my username) and completely forgot about an attached secondary email (which anyways is now deactivated). Fast forward 5 years with tons of personal boards under this account, one morning it stopped working without any notification (yes i revised my spam to be sure about it) with all my data gone.
> At some point, while working on a side project and to share it with a teammate, I attached a secondary email to my account and created few boards under it. This email was my companies email
This makes it seem like it's the third of the options I mentioned (personal account which happens to have a work email as an alternate email). But what you say a little further on (quoted below) makes it clear that it's the second: you used the same Trello account for both personal and work items. If the account had access to the company's boards, it's not just your personal account any more. It's a mixed work/personal account (which, as I and others in this thread have said, is not a good idea).
> As soon as I left the company and my email was disabled, all the boards under that email disappeared from my account.
But you apparently didn't remove that company's email from the Trello account. That's water under the bridge now, but in any case it seems like the company ought to be fine with telling Atlassian that you're no longer working for them and the email under their domain can be removed from the account.
What you seem to be wanting, though, is for Atlassian to just go ahead and erase that company's email from the account, or otherwise disconnect that account totally from the company so you can use it again, without any agreement from the company that that's ok. I don't see why Atlassian should do that.
Surely the sensible option would be for Atlassian to allow you to keep all your personal boards and only show the work-email boards if you sign in, or allow you to 'disconnect' from those?
And if this is technically difficult to do (because boards are not obviously linked to email addresses, or whatever), then that's still on them, but also solvable: allow you to remove BigCo email and just not give you access to any BigCo boards.
If you happened to have created a board yourself for BigCo, then that's still available to you. And if that's not acceptable for Atlassian, they should make boards more obviously connected to email addresses. Or something similar.
The equivalent to the current situation would be to allow you to add BigCo email to your personal Drobox account (for ease of logging in), and then remove you from the entire account when BigCo revokes your access. That's extremely unexpected!
And in fact this used to be how it worked. Work boards showed up in a separate section that was clearly defined as enterprise. So my private work boards, team boards, and template boards were there. My family and personal boards were under my username. And it worked like this for years. Sans souci
Not only did they fuck it up. It was implicitly used as a feature. If you can attach multiple email accounts to a service then of course you would attach your work email to it.
The real devious behaviour was assigning your entire account to another entity to manage and without your permission. I've had to create a new account, ask the enterprise account manager to remove my account, and move my cards to another account. I've been using the account for 9 years and created many small integrations. Why would I want to give that up? Now my workflow is broken because the Trello app only allows one login so I have to decide is it going to be work or personal that I'm viewing because I can't do both.
> the Trello app only allows one login so I have to decide is it going to be work or personal that I'm viewing because I can't do both.
If you're on Android, use Island or another app to set up a local Work account; you can now install a second instance of any app under the same profile, and log it into a different account. I'm unaware if iOS has similar.
> If you can attach multiple email accounts to a service then of course you would attach your work email to it.
Why? To me this is an obvious mistake. If you need to have sole control over your access to your account, then you should never attach an email to it that you don't control. You don't control your work email.
> Surely the sensible option would be for Atlassian to allow you to keep all your personal boards and only show the work-email boards if you sign in, or allow you to 'disconnect' from those?
To me the sensible option is to have separate accounts for work and personal, and to never mix them. That way you're never even tempted to make the mistake of attaching an email you don't control--your work email--to an account that has your own stuff in it that you need to have sole control over.
