"Your account is awaiting admin approval." was true and useless. It never said WHICH mailbox the
account was on, and on 2026-09-03 that silence hid a Gmail alias mismatch for a day: a registration
as np.temu@gmail.com met a Google claim of nptemu@gmail.com, and every screen in the funnel agreed
to say nothing about it.
Every refusal password-login can answer with now uses the codebase's structured {code, reason}
detail, built in one helper. The three that arrive AFTER the password is proven carry the address on
the account plus both gate flags; the two that answer before it (invalid, rate_limited) carry
nothing, so a wrong password and an unknown account stay byte-identical. The frontend renders the
first three as a named screen in place of the form — there is nothing to retype once the password is
correct — with an icon, the two-gate checklist, the address in monospace, and a resend CTA where one
helps. Reporting each gate from its own flag is the payoff of S1: approved-but-unverified is a real
state now, and a screen that assumed a sequence would send that user off to wait for an admin who
has already decided.
The Google access-request notice names the address too, and says so when the request was already on
file under ANOTHER spelling of the same mailbox — the honest version of "we didn't open a second
one", stated only when it applies. It moved from the query string to the fragment: the notice now
carries an address, and a query string lands in every reverse-proxy access log. Same reasoning that
put the verify/reset tokens there, and the same owner already clears it. urlencode, not an f-string,
because URLSearchParams reads a bare + in a fragment as a space and would mangle exactly the
+tag addresses this epic exists to protect.
upsert_pending_invite returns the row it settled on beside the is-new flag, since the row's stored
address is what the notice has to name and what mail will go to.
Deviation from the PendingScreen mockup, deliberately: no "Sign out" button and no separate "Not
your address?" link. The mockup drew the panel in the app shell; the accepted decision (a) keeps the
pending user session-less, so there is no session to end, and the address is named directly above a
"Back to sign in" that answers the same question.
UAT on localdev, both languages: all three refusals with the typed spelling deliberately differing
from the stored one (the panel named the stored one), the resend CTA carrying the typed address into
the resend form, and both access-request banners with a +tag address surviving the fragment round
trip. Throwaway accounts and the language switch reverted.
An account can now hold two true addresses: the one its owner typed, which a Google
sign-in no longer overwrites, and the one Google answers with. Only the first was
stored, so Settings could say 'Connected' without saying connected AS WHOM -- exactly
what someone who registered with a +tag needs to know.
users.google_email (migration 0080) records Google's answer at sign-in and at an
in-app link. /api/me exposes it ONLY when it differs from the account address, so the
comparison lives in one place and the majority, whose two addresses are the same
string, see no change at all. Rendered in the account menu as a muted third line under
the identity, and in the Settings sign-in row under the existing hint.
A short 'Google' label rather than a brand glyph: the app draws one icon set (lucide),
and a generic mail icon next to an email address says nothing. It also reads to a
screen reader, which an unlabelled logo would not.
No backfill is possible -- Google's answer is only known at sign-in -- so accounts
linked earlier stay NULL until their owner next signs in with Google.
Two halves of one rule: the address someone typed is theirs to keep, and it must be
the one that gets them back in.
A plus-tagged or dotted Gmail is often a deliberate choice -- registering as
me+siftlode@gmail.com is how you find out later which site leaked your address. The
Google callback overwrote it with the account's primary, which can never contain a
'+', so the tag vanished on the first Google sign-in and, because sign-in matched the
stored address, took their chosen address with it. The rewrite line is older than
this epic, but S3 made it reachable here by matching adoption across spellings. It
now runs only when the mailbox GENUINELY changed, and lives in a named helper rather
than inline, so the rule has one home.
The three lookups that resolve a typed address -- password login, password reset,
verify resend -- go through find_user_by_email: exact spelling first, then the unique
canonical candidate, and None when several accounts share a mailbox rather than
guessing which one a password should open. Reset and resend previously answered a
different spelling with silence (they reply uniformly by design), which was a dead end
with no way out. Their mail now goes to the address on the account, never the one
typed into the form.
Gmail delivers x.y@, xy@ and xy+tag@ to one inbox; the invite gate only lowercased.
On 2026-09-03 that turned an approved user's Google sign-in into a silent SECOND
access request -- OAuth returns the account's stored primary, which need not be the
spelling they typed -- and left prod with two user rows for one mailbox (ids 13, 14).
The +tag case fails every time: a Google account cannot contain +, so OAuth can only
ever answer with the base address.
Mail still goes to the address AS TYPED; only identity matching uses the canonical
form. utils.canonical_email is the single definition, and a model validator derives
users.email_canonical / invites.email_canonical on every write, so no call site can
forget it. Scope is narrow on purpose: dots are significant on most providers and the
Gmail rule does not hold for Workspace custom domains.
Swept every sibling of the same principle, not just the reported one: is_allowed,
upsert_pending_invite, the Google-callback adoption, _register_account (so no new
duplicate pair can be created), _activate_user_by_email, admin _accounts_for (an
invite backing a live user under another spelling used to look deletable) and
add_invite, plus purge_user, which now erases every canonically-equal invite instead
of leaving one behind that still grants access.
Migration 0079 backfills both columns and indexes them NON-uniquely: prod already
carries canonical duplicates (approved invite pairs since 2026-06-16), and merging
accounts is a judgement call about people's data, not something a migration does on
its own. A test pins the backfill SQL against the Python helper.
peter