Init vs mail in user table.

By jdsaward on 25 Feb 2007 at 02:39 UTC

I am curious about the purpose of the init field in the user table. I've searched the site and cannot find an authoritative answer about its purpose. Anybody know?

Here's some refs:
My previous query about this: http://drupal.org/node/119568
http://drupal.org/node/9159

Comments

initial?

stevenpatz

he/him

commented 26 February 2007 at 20:20

That's what i assumed it meant.

yes

jdsaward commented 28 February 2007 at 01:37

Yes. On reflection though I see my question is different than I first formulated.

It's pretty clear that the init field holds the initially entered email address for an account.

But why is it retained? Presumably it is retained for ever. Why?

The reason is, I have some inherited sites and have discovered that the email address of the initiator of the site is retained in this field, for account 1. The person may no longer have any association with the site. Under certain circumstances that email address (in the init field) receives email notifications from the site. Perhaps this is not always desired.

So the real question I am asking is, what justification is there for retaining this information 'for ever'?

Init: user.module's appendix ?

dewolfe001 commented 23 October 2007 at 01:51

What I'm finding that's weird:
init is holding the valid email address for the user; mail is holding another address-- and in some cases the same address as what has been used by another existing member.

Has any one else seen this?
If so, any ideas of a fix/patch ?

Thanks,

Mike

I'm curious about this

sphism commented 5 September 2008 at 11:38

I'm curious about this myself.

I imported a load of users into drupal and got some errors. Turned out that drupal doesn't like 2 users to have the same email address. But now when users contact us their email address is sometimes incorrect (because i made them all unique)

Complete guess here:

I think the init field must be to keep drupal happy with 100% unique email addresses. Then the mail field allows for the exceptions that need duplicate email addresses?

Anyone know if that's correct as i'm thinking of going back thru and changing all the 'Mail' email addresses back to the correct ones (and therefore creating lots of duplicates)