Just received an email saying you’ve changed my username to be some random string of 5 characters. I already had an actual real Username assigned to my account, and I’m still seeing that exact Username everywhere (both Plex and Forums). So where did you change my username exactly?
Another big question is, WHY? I tried finding the WHY answer in other posts, but it’s just a giant chunk of your userbase extremely confused and proposing nothing but speculation.
So confused and even just checked Announcements on my server to see no mention of this change coming (if it even changed anything?)
As a side note: It’s kind of nerve-wracking, in a security landscape like today’s, to see Plex emails coming from noreply_at_plex_tv_xxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxx@privaterelay.appleid.com and not an official Plex domain, especially when you’re not expecting something to be force-changed on your Plex account.
Most likely you had created another Plex account at some point (either intentionally or accidentally). Some users e.g. ended up creating redundant accounts while linking their Plex Account with “Sign-In with Apple”.
Best double-check the exact e-mail address to which this e-mail was sent (vs. the one linked to your default account).
As for the side-note – that looks rather like a feature on your side (using Apple’s private relay).
I’ve only ever had a single Plex account since 2015 when I originally purchased a Lifetime Subscription.
I simply use an iPad and iPhone to watch media on my Plex Media Server, that’s the entirety of Apple device/account related usage on my entire home network.
100% of my email infrastructure is through Exchange, and someone else sending me an email externally FROM *.apple.id.com is nothing I can control on my end…That would be the Plex Team using something that sent it through that address.
Could something have been automatically created on Plex’s side by one of the iOS apps possibly without my knowing? I honestly can’t find mention of this new username anywhere in my UIs or scanning all of my Plex log files…it’s just still my original Username I would have expected since 2015.
Re: your follow-up on the announcement…That’s great that it was posted on Plex Forums, where people usually only go when they’re having problems. Why wasn’t it also included in the Announcements area of PMS itself? Normally when a company makes planned changes to user accounts, you get an email ahead of time and/or in normal announcement locations, because your typical users don’t live on Support Forums.
The only thing coming to mind would be some friend forwarding the notification that THEY got a new username.
The Plex for iOS clients won’t create a separate account for you. There’s only been cases where users accidentally created a new Plex account, when attempting to activate “Sign-In With Apple” (causing a warning to be added to the related support article) – though as you’re not using that, it seems to be unrelated.
Regarding the forum only announcement: your point was raised in a number of other threads and forwarded to Plex’ team for future consideration/improvement.
This is not the address which was used as the sender of that notification mail.
You can see the original sender address at the beginning: noreply@plex.tv
the part which comes after that xxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxx@privaterelay.appleid.com indicates that this message was sent to an account which used “Login with Apple”.
As @tom80H mentioned above, if a user uses “Login with Apple” and then logs in to his/her Apple ID, Apple puts in this cryptic @privaterelay.appleid.com address.
If you haver never linked your original Plex account with an AppleID (which you didn’t), then this will create a completely separate Plex user account upon “Login with Apple”.
The email was intended for the person who created the Plex user account with the AppleID.
Plex cannot know that you already have another account which uses email and password as login method.
Yeah, I guess I’m even more confused now after looking up how @privaterelay.appleid.com works. Since I’ve only ever signed-in to Plex using my username/email, and never my Apple account, I’m unsure how it would have even generated one of those privaterelay addresses on Plex’s behalf.
The only thing I can think of at this point, is I did do the 30-day trial of Tidal like 3-years ago, could that possibly have caused some form of linkage that would have caused this?
Thanks for all the suggestions and info thus far both @tom80H and @OttoKerner.
Not if you didn’t use “Login with Apple” at some point.
Maybe you tried “Login with Apple” when you first attempted to connect your “fruity hardware” to your Plex account?
Which of course didn’t work, so you switched immediately to login with your email + Plex password. But the extra Plex account had already been created at this point (and probably laid dormant since then).
If it creates an account without a successful login and/or linking Apple ID to Plex account, then it’s definitely possible that I at some point accidentally clicked on the Apple ID sign-in button on the iOS app login screen.
I’ve never actually gone through the process of linking Plex and Apple ID though, so it would have never been able to successfully login via that method. (I’m not a huge mobile device fan, I mainly use PCs, so I don’t do much with my Apple ID and/or SSO on those devices, they’re literally just for Plex / Reading News)
The thing is: on an iDevice, you are usually already signed into an AppleID. The Apple app store and the iCloud use this.
And the credentials you are putting in when you use “Login with Apple” are those for the Apple account. So they are valid. And thus the login is successful. And thus the Plex account is created. But of course this account doesn’t have access to your server (unless you link it Use Google, Facebook, or Apple to Sign in with Plex | Plex Support ).
Ahhhhhhh, gotcha. I bet that’s exactly what it is. I feel extremely dumb now
I was completely unaware that it auto-creates an account on-the-fly if you just simply click on one of those "Continue with " buttons. I’m used to SSO environments where things won’t function unless they’re manually provisioned ahead-of-time, or you go through some manual set of steps in-between to confirm the link; but I can definitely see how this makes it extremely easy for new users coming on-board.
Thanks again for the info! I can lower my paranoia levels now.
