Why do I have to maintain access to my email account?

Question

What role does my email address play in publishing to Maven Central? I previously used my issues.sonatype.org account for everything, so what changed?

Answer

Due to the decommissioning of issues.sonatype.org and other account management changes, we wanted to provide clarity on what purpose email addresses play in publishing to Maven Central.

Receiving emails

As a part of the improvements to our security practices, new accounts must verify their email account. This is done by clicking a link in an email, which demonstrates that the account is real and can receive emails.

As was previously the case with issues.sonatype.org, the user's email is used whenever going through the "Forgot password?" flow to recover access to their central.sonatype.com account. If the email address cannot receive emails, account recovery may not be possible.

Lastly, we send important updates regarding changes that will impact publishers to publishers email addresses. While we do also publish general information on this site, there have been situations where we've needed to reach out to a subset of publishers with specific instructions related to edge-cases that impact them.

Sending emails

Our current replacement service for issues.sonatype.org does not directly integrate with our new account management system, so we expect all publishing support requests to come from the email address associated with a known email address for a valid publisher account.

We have improvements on our roadmap to enable more self-service features for things that are common support requests, but those improvements will only be made for the Central Publisher Portal and not the legacy OSSRH service.

Service accounts

As a part of our Central Publisher Portal roadmap, we intend to enable the generation and management of tokens associated with an organization, rather than individual users. Until that is available, we recognize that users often create "service" accounts that are shared by multiple users. If doing so, we want to note that the email associated with the service account has the same expectations that are listed in the above sections.