How to get email from twitter user using OAuthTokens

[Adam_Elio]

Hi. came here to say i will not allow twitter signup / login from my app too until twitter decide to give email access through its oauth api.

Maybe if enought dev take this decision and the twitter auth disapear from applications while facebook and google are still there, twitter will change his mind.

[ElliotChong]

Just learned the hard way that Twitter doesn’t allow me to ask for email permission from the user. What a waste of effort.

+1 for getting this fixed.

[Maziyar_sh]

I don’t see the reason why employees keep making excuses or trying to make a logic out of this weakness and absence of a feature in their API.
Email address has been the only way to create, find, and check if the user has been already signed up for a very very long time. This is a lack of a primary feature and it should be fixed. How hard could it be to include the email address in the response!

So please stop making the excuse and respect the developers community.
Thanks.

[ryan_kimber]

You can add me to the list of developers choosing to disable authentication with Twitter. I’d really like to provide it, but need to be able to match users up to prevent double-registration as much as possible, and the only way to do that would be through their e-mail address. If I have to ask the user for their e-mail address when they sign in with Twitter, I might as well just have them signup the old-fashioned way (using e-mail and password) instead while offering (and encouraging) Facebook and Google authentication as a shortcut.

I have long wondered why you so rarely see ‘Sign up with Twitter’ out there next to the options for Facebook and Google (and lately, GitHub, LinkedIn and WindowsLive), but the lack of an e-mail address offered in the user profile makes the lack of adoption by the developer community perfectly understandable.

Until there’s an option to request user permission for the e-mail address associated with the Twitter account, we won’t be offering the option to “Sign up with Twitter” in any of our applications.

[JeffSavin]

Just adding my name to the list of developers that will NOT being implementing any “Sign Up with Twitter” for the sole fact that no email address is returned in the Twitter Authentication strategy.

What a shame! You’d think after all these years and developers requesting it, Twitter would have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Hello???

[BenGabb]

Same here as everyone else.

Got Facebook and Google working. Now finished Twitter and find no email returned.

Out it goes…

[BenAzan]

+1 for absolutely needing to allow the user to share his/her e-mail during the sign in with twitter process. It is ridiculous that it’s not included and is putting a real hamper on my project.

[Nicolab_net]

+1
After set up my Twitter Authentication strategy, I see that there is no email. I was not expecting to this EPIC FAIL
Now next step, I remove Twitter of the connection choice.

[xsessions]

+1 again!
Just came across this page, since I was figuring out how to get the user_id back.
On Youtube i saw an Indian guy get his twitter account mobile phone verified. Here in Holland
i just get the message back that no carrier is supporting it. So I got stuck on getting read AND writing permissions for my app, which i thought would be the problem for my user_id return.

But without email address support, I don’t have to look any further and therefor Twitter is A NO GO.
Byeeee twitter!

[CreativForm]

From a professional point of view, it should be approved access to email address. Consumer gets the explanation that will share their data. And he choose “Approve” or “Cancel”.

[chrisallenlane]

+1. “Login with Twitter” is useless if I can’t get a user’s email address.

[Amandips]

re-tweeting … twitter api are useless without email… such a hard work at-last … waste of time … sadly …

[FDahlingerTest1]

+1
Just wasted a day of work thinking I got email address back for customer sign in.

[indigodev1]

1 hour wasted time setting up twitter sign in.

[levihlewis]

I’ve also decided to exclude twitter as oauth service provider for this reason.

[tombatossals]

Please include the email in the oauth authorization response, this feature is really needed for every one of us that want to implement twitter as an authorization provider to our web application.

[andypiper]

The majority of apps that use Twitter for login, have a secondary step inside their app requesting the user’s email address. This is a perfectly valid flow but I’m afraid we don’t issue the email address at this time.

[Stephan_NE]

I don’t get this twitter, why can’t we request the email address from your api? If the user does not want to give it up they could opt out. Not allowing this hurts both you and the people who want to let users sign up using twitter. I might be tempted to have a warning for my users who want to sign up with twitter saying: “Caution: Signing up with twitter requires X numbers of extra steps. We suggest using Facebook / Google plus in stead”. Or simpler: not having twitter signup at all.

[andrewjknox]

+1 Same boat as everyone else. Implemented it assuming it’d be there, and lo and behold. It ain’t No Twitter signup I’m afraid as I don’t want the additional step post callback.

[matt_hew_slater]

The majority of apps that use Twitter for login, have a secondary step inside their app requesting the user’s email address.

Therein lies the problem. You’ve caused countless developers to reinvent the wheel repeatedly when you didn’t need to - and a complex and time-consuming wheel at that. The “majority of” anything should indicate that you, not the user or developer, have done something wrong and need to take steps to correct it. This thread has informed you as to what that “something wrong” is. The entire community has repeated over and over and over again what they want and yet you have, for inexplicable reasons, stuck your fingers in your ears and gone “lalalalalalalala” at the top of your lungs. Just because you think your “solution” is valid doesn’t make it so.

I’m the author of one of the most popular open source single sign-on solutions on the planet. I don’t offer Twitter sign in. Why? Because you don’t offer email address and I’m not going to make end-users jump through hoops. It is wrong to make any end-user jump through hoops. Developers have already told you want they want. I have Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn sign ins however. Why? Because those services offer email addresses. It’s really simple: Offer email address via OAuth as an extra option that developers can leverage and let the user decide if they want to sign in using Twitter. All the other major social media providers have it as something optional but available. Just follow suit and this issue can finally go away. I have only seen one website out there that uses “Login with Twitter” but I’ve seen countless “Login with Facebook” and many “Login with Google” sites.

Put in another light: This is a market share issue - you have lost all sorts of goodwill with developers, which translates to millions of dollars in lost revenues for Twitter over something that can be easily fixed on your end. There are plenty of examples in just this thread alone where Twitter has directly wasted a developer’s time, which means the company they work for wasted money. All you have to do is show this thread to your board of directors and shareholders and they’ll change the policies stopping you from implementing this change. For every developer coming out of the woodwork and commenting, there are thousands of others who simply decide that the issue has been addressed and don’t bother commenting and also don’t implement “Login with Twitter”. Even conservatively, you are looking at roughly 100,000 developers (1,000 * number of posts) and telling them they don’t matter. If you told that to that many people who really wanted something in person, you would get destroyed by the mob that followed the announcement.

This is also a financial issue. Let’s do some basic math: 100,000 * $30/hr * 4 hours per integration attempt = $12 million. That’s a severely conservative figure on the industry-wide financial losses incurred by this issue. Actual financial losses probably approach up to ten times that or roughly $100 million or just slightly under .2% of Twitter’s valuation as a company. .2% is enough to cause a serious stock change. This problem will not go away and will continually get more and more expensive for the company until it is fixed.

This is one of your oldest unresolved threads regarding a specific change to your OAuth implementation and one of the easiest issues to correct. Please change your internal policies and fix this problem. Just based on the most conservative estimated financial losses alone, I’m sorely tempted to file a class action lawsuit against Twitter regarding this issue for wasting man-hours in the “majority” of software implementations as well as on behalf of those who wasted their time and their company’s time developing a solution only to find out that the email address is not available via OAuth. The class action would force the change requested in this thread through legal means but I and other developers are hoping it doesn’t come to that. “Majority” is your word, not mine, but you’ve now given anyone the legal ammo they need to bring a class action suit against Twitter. Even if you make this highly requested change to your platform, Twitter is still at risk of a class action suit for all those wasted man-hours since December 2011 but making the change would certainly have a chilling effect on any lawsuit.