Using Multiple Email Addresses

[krislynch]

I have two email addresses set up on PayPal. Both are confirmed, one is set to primary.

I have my personal and business email addresses here and want to use my business address as my 'payable' address for business-related items, but don't kwow if I need to change that to be my primary address in order for this to work.

So what I need to know is:

1. If I change the primary address, does that become my login address?

2. Can I receive payments via either address, regardless of which one is primary?

3. Why do people generally have more than one address set up here anyway?

Thank you for the clarification.

[PayPal_Adrian · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the boards!

1.  No.  You can use either one to log in.

2.  Yes, as long as it is confirimed.

3.  There are a number of different reasons - certain account types (such as Business or Premier) can sort their payments received by which email address was paid.  This helps them track transactions based on source (different websites).

Hope this helps,

Adrian

[ron_lastof_exis]

Funny you should ask -- today is my 1st in the forum, & my YEAR-LONG problem is related to this question!

(Paypal has NOT solved or resolved my problem, by the way... this is my "next" attempt to see if they can solve.)

I'd think the MAIN reason one has a different primary e-mail address from the PayPal "ID" is as follows, as in my situation I realized several years ago:

At the time I signed up for PayPal (one of the "early" users), I only had 1 email account, and it was with a local service provider.  Years ago I realized one day I would probably "leave" that service provider, while I am "stuck" with the irrelevant, obsolete email address as my PayPal ID (that can't be changed).  Back then I signed up with a "portal" email service (e.g., Yahoo or gmail) so I could move forward without worrying about leaving my local service provider.  And I set my PayPal "primary" email address to the new one.

Well, that seemed to work fine for a few years; I received emails from PayPal all the time that someone had sent me money, or I had sent them money.  Still, it  bothered me that my PayPal ID was an email address that one day would become obsolete (which did, a few months ago), but I figured I wasn't the only user in this position so it "had" to be a non-problem.

THIS YEAR, I noticed that when eBay buyers paid me with PayPal, I did NOT receive any emails from PayPal, "you've got money".  (I received other emails fine.)  Once I realized this was happening, I contacted PayPal (around early August) and they told me it was a known problem being worked on(!).  I stopped listing on eBay ever since because of this problem.  Out of the blue this week, I had the situation arise where someone wanted to pay me for something & I suggested PayPal... you guessed it, they paid Dec. 6 but I received no email & had to remember to check my PayPal account (further adding unnecessarily to PayPal's servers) to see that they had indeed used PayPal.  (Before I quit my local internet provider service, I logged onto my email account there, and sure enough, the "missing" emails from PayPal "you've got money" were all in that now-obsolete account.)  If anyone can get PayPal to finally fix this problem, I'd be most appreciative!  Best regards.

[PayPal_Adrian]

Welcome to the boards!

The "You've got Money" emails are sent only to the email address that the buyers payment was sent to.  The primary email does not receive a separate notification of the payment if it was designated as the recipient of the payment.

For example, if I have two email addresses - A and B - and A is primary, but the buyer sends the payment to address B, only address B receives the notification.

You may consider asking your buyers, checking the old auction listings, and/or checking your History logs to see which email address your buyers paid or have  been paying. 

If this is the other email address, that would fit.

Hope this helps,

Adrian

[johnnycoal]

Sorry but your respose to the A&B is incorrect. I have a business acct. It  and a web site in this name. The buyer buys at my business acct., but the E-mail goes to the acct. that I opened the paypal acct with. Not the business E-mail account.So what you told the last person was wrong.

[PayPal_Adrian]

johnnycoal,

If you have an administrative email address on your business account, then the notifications would go there instead.  What is listed above is the correct and current functionality for standardized payment notifications. 

I don't mention the administrative email address variant in the post above because the ability to set an administrative email address was turned off years ago.  Most accounts no longer have them. 

Adrian

[monocoupe]

I want to set up an online sales via my blog. I can folow PayPal's easy turorial to complete that without problems. I do have a question.

1. When a customer hits "Buy Now" to pay via Paypal, I need two separate emails to go out. One email notifies me of the sale and alerts me that money is going to my account. The second email goes to the person in another state who warehouses and distributes my sold items. He needs the email to get the items shipped quickly. I don't care if the emails are identical, I just need both to go out when the customer pays for the product. Is this email set-up possible in PayPal?

[PayPal_Adrian]

monocoupe,

This isn't directly possible with PayPal, but you could set it up via an API, a third party shopping cart, or by having your email server auto-forward the notification.

Hope this helps,

Adrian

[dampr]

I have many mail accounts. I can change how much mail in paypal. thanks

[ShirleyVickers]

The problem described above (lost email notifications of "you've been paid") is EXACTLY the same problem we are experiencing. Last Spring, our ISP (Qwest) upgraded us to a higher bandwidth service, but at the same time changed the domain name part of our email addres from "@qwest.net" to "@q.com". I had heard of other people having problems in not getting email when this happened, and Qwest assured us that we did NOT have to change the email address, that we could keep the old one. WRONG!! They did it anyway.

We changed the eBay listings from the qwest.net address to the q.com address, but it didn't seem to "take" until we found out that Blackthorne had the old address. EVERY time we listed using Blackthorne, we had to edit the listing. Sometimes we would miss one and somebody would buy an item but no payment notification came through. Then we had to contact PayPal to get it straightened out.

Finally we edited the account address in Blackthorne, and that seemed to work - unti last August 3rd. I notice that one of the above users mentioned that it started happening to them around the SAME TIME ("early August").

We have been round and round with both PayPal and eBay on this isssue, and NOTHING they suggest seems to work. I have even had my computer tech scour the .dll's, any other files, and even the registry for the old email address to make sure it isn't on OUR computer, and it isn't.

This seems to be a glitch in eBay's databases, hanging onto any OLD email addresses that have been entered at one point in time. EVERY time we use Blackthorne to submit a listing, the "Preferred payment" field has to be edited, as it automatically fills in the payment contact address field (under the PayPal section) with the OLD email address. ALL of the profile information on BOTH eBay and PayPal - that we can find, anyway - are up-to-date with the current, only, primary and CONFIRMED email address - yet EVERY time a listing is submitted, the old email address shows up.

What is going on? Is anybody ever going to pay enough attention to this problem to realize it's a problem with eBay/PayPal databases and not users??

This takes much time not only on our side, but also on PayPal's side - because each time we have an overlooked listing that does not get edited, we have to call up PayPal and get the customer service reps to fix it. Anybody who spends that amount of human time on a software glitch that can be easily remedied must not care about the added expense of any number of software glitches that have accumulated over the years.

And THAT will cost PayPal many customers who will quit using PayPal because of this AND OTHER security concerns.

regards,

S. Vickers