GCE Accounts and your official Argonne Email address

Hi, everybody.  I was originally going to send this as a more targeted email to users who I know were affected by this issue, but it turns out the scope is broader than that.  But it’s also a nice opportunity to remind everyone to make sure their info is up to date and what they expect.

Earlier this year, we discovered an issue with how email addresses were being populated into GCE accounts.  After much investigation, it turned out we were not using the authoritative source for email address (which is Workday) and thus some of the address data we had was incorrect.  This came to light because we were not getting proper email addresses assigned for external collaborators, and we implemented a fix for this on May 17.

It turns out, however, that the issue was more widespread than we thought and a large number of Argonne employees and contractors were also affected.  The result of this is that starting on May 17, if your official Argonne email address was not <username>@anl.gov, your email address in GCE will have changed to match what it should have been all along.  This is most common with users who are using a divisional alias, such as <foo>@mcs.anl.gov, or if you had an @anl.gov alias set up that differed from your username.

The primary effect here is anything that uses your email address in GCE, such as git.cels.anl.gov, will have the new official address now.  In the case of git, if that differs from your address on xgitlab.cels.anl.gov or gitlab.cels.anl.gov, it will prevent migrations off the old servers from matching your history.

What I recommend you do is login to https://accounts.cels.anl.gov and take a look at the email address shown under your account.  This is the same one that’s in Workday and the Argonne Directory (https://apps.inside.anl.gov/directory/).

Unfortunately, you can’t change your email address on your own.  In fact, I can’t do it for you.  If you want to change how your email address is presented, please contact the BIS help desk at [email protected] or 630-252-9999 and they can update it to the preferred address. If you do change it, please be sure to login to https://accounts.cels.anl.gov after the change is complete, as this will update your record in our system with the new address.