That's right.
I have an email address with my current ISP, but I usually don't use it.
I have another one with an free-mailing company, and there are several available here in Germany (web.de, gmx.de, freenet.de to name just a few), and a peek at Wikipedia shows, there are as well plenty of them in the US.

Sorry, all of this avoids the issue. Web mail is at best a compromise, and no substitute for mail using Thunderbird, Outlook, Windows Mail, whatever the MAC O/S provides. Web mail is clunky to use. I know that lots of people do use it; but millions more use mail tied to an ISP. ISP's are changeable, email addresses are a weak thing to which to tie and identification.

Gmail can be used with any mail client, either with IMAP or POP3. There are probably others too.

I'm not forcing you to switch to a free email provider, but there are certain advantages. You can quickly check your email anywhere in the world, select ones also support email clients, and you never ever have to change your email address again (ehr, unless they go bankrupt).

I'm using gmail myself and I used Thunderbird with it (I prefer the webinterface now), I use the webinterface, and I sync my mobile phone with it (there are clients for Android and IOS). I'm very satisfied with it.

My mom uses gmail in combination with Windows Live mail.

I use Thunderbird for my mail at home, I use the web interface only if I'm away.
If POP3 or IMAP is provided, it's no problem at all.
I know some people, who only use their ISPs email, but (probably) millions more use some independent ones.

Edith says:
WCG has a way of avoiding it: It uses the user name as identification item, not the mail address. But to implement that now in BOINC, and with dozens of independent projects that can't compare whether a user name is properly used, is impossible.

And similarly ... if he NOW changes to a gmail address, although it would solve his problem for NEW BOINC users, it is IMPOSSIBLE for him to start using the new gmail address AND AVOID changing his current email address in BOINC projects -- which is the ORIGINAL problem he has/had.

Apparently ... "you can't get there from here" applies in this case.

On a personal side note ... once again Willy, you seem to be deflecting the issue and creating a new one instead of addressing the ORIGINAL issue that "KWSN I'm Crazy Now" (and many others in many other threads - including me about 2-3 months ago) raised in the beginning of this thread

magyarficko, huzzah, huzzah, no disrespect intended to Willy, but this is a serious issue.

It might be a serious issue to you, but it's not for me and certainly not for Willy, since he can't do anything about the BOINC way of handling user identification. He does BOINCstats not BOINC!

Gruß,
Gundolf

But Willy could try to do something (or at least flat out admit that he can't, if that's the case) about the seemingly large number of people who suffer from unresolvable split CPID issues when they try to change their e-mail address, and not just pretend that it doesn't happen or can be easily fixed.

I have first hand experience with this problem and I've heard many others say the same thing. I tried changing my e-mail a while back, got the split CPID and could not resolve it any other way except by changing back to my original e-mail address. If I could change my e-mail address and overcome the split CPID problem I would GLADLY switch to a gmail address so I never have to change it again. But ....

Willy has said more than often that he can't do anything about the CPID.
He has several FAQs about this issue

• FAQ #6
  
• FAQ #12
  
• FAQ #14
  
• FAQ #16
  
• FAQ #63
  
• FAQ #66
  
• FAQ #68
  

And he answered in countless posts about this theme in this part of the forum, probably more in older threads as he's a bit tired to answer the same question over and over and over again.

In short:
CPID is created and handled by the distinct BOINC projects and your computer(s), the stats sites can do nothing about it.
Projects can be shut down, as well nothing the stats sites can do anything about.
CPID is the only possible item for the stats sites to identify a user as double names are possible and email addresses must not be exchanged.

If you want to change your email constantly, and you want to keep the CPID in line even with retired projects, that's simply not possible. It's also nothing that can be changed for the past, as the BOINC software itself has to be changed, and that has to be done "in Berkeley", where "in Berkeley" means by the BOINC project, the developers don't necessarily sit in Berkeley. The appropriate place for such issues is either the forum for BOINC or the BOINC developers mailing list.

#6 - Not Applicable - This problem is about changing ONE e-mail address (the same across all projects) to another e-mail address (the same across all projects) NOT using more than one e-mail adress at a time.

#12 - Simply not true! If you are one of the unlucky ones, you can wait until hell freezes over and nothing will happen.

#14 - ??? - Appears to bring me to the same place in the FAQ as #12

#16 - Refers to "Retired Projects" NOT "Split CPIDs" resulting from e-mail address changes. And furthermore ...the Sync Retired Project never worked for me anyways.

#63 - ??? WTF ??? - Not sure about this one ... don't really see how it applies to e-mail address changes, but nevertheless (at leat in my experience) it appears to be NOT TRUE. When I changed e-mail addresses ALL my projects went to the new (WRONG) CPID including all the ones I was detached from.

#66 - Sorry, I don't read German, and I can't be bothered running that thru Google Translate. English version link seems to take me to #63 (see above) anyways.

#68 - Same comments as for #66 above.

My question is simple, why did Willy create the "Edit E-Mail Address", "Renew CPID", and "Sync Retired Projects" functions when (apparently) changing e-mail addresses creates stats problems and the other two functions don't appear to work to resolve any of these problems?

Sorry, I forgot to delete the de. in the link, but a click on the right flag should solve this "problem".
As with "seems to take me to #63": If the number is at the end, it will not scroll further down and the right FAQ might not be at the top of the link page.

"Edit E-Mail Address" is for just this, and it works. Of course a new address will get you a new CPID, that's how BOINC works and Willy can do nothing about.
"Sync Retired Projects" works as well as supposed, it will bring in line the retired projects for those that have them already in their BAM! account. If you just attached to BAM!, or had for example DynaPing not in your BAM! portfolio, there is nothing Willy can do about it. To quote the explanations on that page:

"Renew CPID" is just for BAM!. It will reunite your BAM! account with your project created CPID. To quote from the manual on the relevant page:

You know, I naively suggested the CPID as the identifier believing that I should try to offer some concrete solution. I regret that I offered it up, all it became was a scapegoat.

In truth, all you guys need to do is pick something which we type in which is immutable. I am going to naively offer up another suggestion: the answer to one or more of those security questions some financial sites use, like "What was your grandfather's first name?" . If this humble suggestion is not useful, then, you guys still have an un-solved problem.

Right now, even if I was to choose to go to a web mail account, I am stuck.

I know and understand your problem, alas, it's nothing that can be done here on this stats site, as all this stuff has to be implemented in the core of the BOINC package, thus the right address for you is Berkeley.
As I already wrote in the post a bit down this thread (or up, depending on sorting ), the right places would be:

• Forum of the BOINC project
  
• Developers Mailing List
  

Please don't be offended, but there's nothing Willy (or any other stats provider) can do about this. And this stats site is nothing officially from BOINC, it's just Willys volunteer donation to us other volunteers.

I posted this thread at BOINC forums in a post asking how we get this fixed.

If anyone wants to see how much attention this gets, the thread is at

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=6134

the problem/solution really has nothing to do with how we manage our e-mail addresses and how the CPID's are created...
you already have all of the stats, but they are located in 2 (or more) different pages - each linked to their individual CPID's...

just give us a way to manually enter a second/old CPID (or as many as necessary) to the account for the main CPID that will link to and combine the stats from all projects that used either of the CPID's onto one stats page for our account.. that way the stats from projects created with the old CPID, including all orphaned/closed projects tied to that CPID will be brought together with the stats linked to the new CPID...

thanks for your help...

So that everybody who likes to cheat a bit can add Poorboy's CPID to his account? How do you want to make this secure, prevent that someone adds an account that is not his?

I just had the same problem here... finally decided to update my email address to the one from my new ISP and BINGO, lost around 2 million credits.
So, I have gone into BAM and set it back to my old one (which is sort of a pain in the butt, because I wont receive emails about competitions etc from projects.

Somehow I have ended up with 4 "veebee"s over the years, only one has a "profile" which enables me to change the email address... would be great if I could get into the other 3....

This truly sucks, having to use an obsolete email address.

How long did you wait for the stats to update? Sometimes it can take a day or two for all the stats to be imported and updated. Also, changing your email address at BAM will only affect those projects which are attached and show up in "Project resources".


Do you still have a host attached to any of the projects attached to these orphaned CPIDs? If so, you could get the account key and change your email address that way--assuming the projects in question will allow you to sign in using the account key.

I'm not sure what you mean by "only one has a profile".

Hi noderaiser:

I waited at least a cpl of days and no luck, so I went back to all the projects and changed the email address back to my old Email addy, and have waited again for a couple of days, (and past the Sunday night update etc), still no luck.

So a day and a bit ago I tried the "renew CPID" button (which I have been scared to do !) and still nothing has changed.



Unfortuneately, no old nodes attached to projects with those orphaned CPIDS - but I have seen that varying projects even on the one computer have differing CPIDs, yet they all have same email address, same username, same password, same postal code etc.


EDIT:
just managed to log into one of the other accounts... has a capital "V" ..it has basically the remainder of my projects... now to somehow get THEM to join up.....


If you search for username "veebee" in BAM, there are 4... all me, yet only one of them actually has a "profile filled out" and it seems to be the only one I can log in to - even tthough I have always used the same p/word etc.

this is really starting to annoy me - I have worked hard and spent a bit of money etc building machines/ running them 24/7 to get into the top 250 in the world, and now I cannot even show my stats properly...using ANYBODY's stats program.

Well, now its getting confusing....

"My detailed stats" (for me, here) has been showing only 8 projects (plus some retired ones), including DnetC for over a week now, with a total of 80 odd million credits.

Now, I can only log in to the "veebee" account that has the rest of my projects (without DnetC) - no matter whether I put a capital or lower case "V" on the username at login.

If you search for "veebee" you will see the 4 users (all me) the bottom 2 are basically "redundant"... it is the two on top of the list I need to join back up.

There always were 4 (before this problem) and I never had ANY "retired projects" showing on my Boincstats sig, now both those accounts have some each of the retired ones....

WHAT A MESS ! - just because I changed my email address ! and even changing it back hasn't fixed it....

I was wondering if I should go into all my accounts and assure they are all identical usernames (no / or all capital V), but I have accounts of each type within each of the BAM profiles/ stats, so i dont think it is a determining factor....

HELP PLEASE ....

And the beat goes on...and on...and on.

Yes, but you created the mess in the first place by changing your email address back and forth.

And there's nothing any statistics site can do about that! The only means to identify users is the Cross Project ID (one for each account <cross_project_id> and each host <host_cpid> ), which is managed by the BOINC projects, not the statistics sites.

You can find the CPID(s) assigned by the projects in your client_state.xml file. Warning: if you make any changes to that file, you risk the loss of all work units downloaded to that host!

You can search that file for the string <cross_project_id> and make a list of all IDs you find. You'll see that all projects with the same CPID as listed in your Main account page appear in your detailed stats.

And since the CPID is derived from your email address (see also <email_hash> in client state), each time you change that, the projects have to synchronise again, which can only be done if all your hosts connects to all projects (perhaps multiple times).

Gruß,
Gundolf

OK - problem rectified itself overnight...! (finally, back in the top 250 worldwide !)

well, it was rectified because I found a few projects which somehow managed to keep my new email address, even though they were (or DnetC was) the first projects I changed back to the OLD email address.

My suggestion to anyone contemplating updating their recent change to a new email address: Either
1) DON'T DO IT (if you value your stats staying together) or

2) change email address only on your "main account page" here at BAM. (apparently "noderaiser" did it that way and it updated email addy at projects automatically).


if that doesn't work, simply change it back here, then after a day or so, check at your projects that you email address is still back at your old one.

All it means is you miss out on the odd email from projects. Join a team and most of the important ones should be "announced" on your team site.

Thanks for the help all those who responded,

veebee

It seems to me that the "Edit email address" option has been removed from boincstats. I was planning on changing mine from a hotmail to a gmail, as I very rarely use the hotmail one anymore.

Is there a way of changing it here, and having it change all of my projects (at least the ones I have set up through here)? Or do I need to go to each individual project and do it? I'm not worried about any "retired" projects, as they were years ago, and I don't even know what information I used on them (and don't track nor care about) them anymore.

I'm also basing this on the replies in the BOINC forum, where they said that if you use the same email address for all of the projects, they will eventually sync up with your correct stats. And in my case, if they don't, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I'm doing this for the good that it does for the projects, not so much for the stats (although they are nice too).

Have a great week
Patrick.