Dear Twitter API team,

You seriously think we developers are going to always build apps that are “Twitter Auth Only.”
Hate to break it to you mate: Of course not!
We have a choice of other providers like Facebook/Google/Github and now Linkedin.
Slightly audacious of you to think that the same user who has accounts with other providers (some of them way more popular than you are) think of you as their legal email address guardian.

Why don’t you get it? It fails miserably as a authentication scheme. Sure the APIs are great if I want to consume them. But for an ‘authentication-only’ use case, this is absolutely useless.

Let me know if you disagree.

Cheers
-Prem

WOW! I just implemented Twitter API in one of my apps and was shocked to find out that there was no way to retrieve user’s email… So, of course I started searching for answer thinking I must have done something wrong and unfortunately I came across this forum which confirmed this tremendous shortcoming.

My “solution” is for my users to login using the any of the other OAuth options I provided them (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn) and once they are authenticated I will give them the option to update their profile in my app with the Twitter handle which will subsequently be used to grant them future login permission using Twitter. Not a workable solution for new sign-ups (since you can’t check duplicates against other OAuth services).

I agree with most posts here… epic fail by Twitter!

Are you serious!? Twitter, please add email to the user api!

Seriously why should i ask the user to supply his/her email address after logging in via twitter, Email address is a major data item that developers need to acquire after a user logs in via twitter. Kindly allow the API to return the email address as well, just like the way Facebook and other providers do.

We, the business owners, want our users’ email addresses so that we can engage with them. It is a vital part of our sales cycle.

It seems unlikely that Twitter will ever release this information via their login API so let’s all just decide not to use it and stick with Google, Facebook and LinkedIn for third-party login.

I’m very glad I found this thread before I implemented it.

Without email address it is useless.
email address is very useful here’s one example
In case i want to send email to first time registered user using email how can i do?
i want to send promotions email how can i send?
i want to send notice to user how can i do?

you need to incorporate email with this details otherwise it’s useless to variety of side specially all e-commerce portal and you will fail to compete with FB in near future.

Was about to add Twitter to my 4 mobile apps… Until… NO EMAIL!!! failure once again!!!

How do I contact the user from my webpage when is not logged in to twitter? (if no email address provided)

without email adress
sign with twitter is equal zer0

With this, there is little or no point in adding twitter logins to your system. One still has to ask for an email, verify for uniqueness, attach to already existing user and then verify the email itself. Epic fail!

It’s less usable because, let’s assume this scenario. I want to authenticate my app with Twitter. However I want to detect if the user signing in with twitter is already a user in my system (cause otherwise I would redirect him to the registration process which would be wrong, cause he just wants to connect his account with Twitter). Right now I can’t do all of this, because Twitter doesn’t give me access to the user’s email, and there is no other way to link these two accounts.

I know it’s not a fair comparison, but facebook does give you this information if you ask the user for a special permission, so why not do the same here? If the user doesn’t want to allow the app to see the email, well that’s another problem, but the ability should exist. That’s my take on this :slight_smile:

lol really, google and facebook are already providing email address because they understand it. why can’t twitter be like them? please provide user email address… don’t be selfish.

This way twitter login becomes practically useless. If I ask for it myself, then the user needs to confirm it etc.
Isn’t it possible to do it the way that it’s available only when requested and granted, the same way you do it with x_auth_access_type param - read or write.

Twitter API team, we need email address…

wat? wat is dis? I’m 12 y/o and no email? wat?

You can use scopes to specify if you need access to the email address or not. It is responsibility of the developer to require as few scopes as possible, and it’s responsibility of the end user to decide if (s)he wants to allow the application to proceed with the required scope. Twitter is dropping this altogether by not allowing the feature in any case.

If you need a concrete use case, we are providing 6 different OAuth providers (1 and 2) and are implementing email confirmation just for Twitter.

Guys, I understand that users are a pest, but look at the size of this thread. Please reconsider.

twitter login sucks …with out email why do v need this…if i have to ask for email and then again send verification email. (which is normal sign up + one more step) .

Twitter should immediately shut down their Login service! Its ridiculous that they are not providing user’s email address. Most systems use email address to identify a user. Without an email address how the system will interact with its users? Simple question but Twitter has no answer to it. “Login Via Twitter” and then “Please type in your email address - sorry for the trouble. Twitter does not provide it!”. If I do not supply an email address my sign up is INCOMPLETE and I am not an user to the system, because system does not know how to COMMUNICATE with me without an email address is supplied and VERIFIED. Does Twitter have an answer???

No way! Just take out Twitter from your login options and you will stay happy! Completely useless API as far as login is concerned…

Most of the developers spent a lot of time trying to implement Twitter login, just to discover after that that email address was not provided. So the efforts were basically useless for many of them.
If Twitter wants to continue hiding the email address (for privacy or whatever questionable arguments), at least they should make crystal CLEAR in the documentation that email will be never provided. It would save a lot of time to developers since most of them discovered it just after in the discussion forums!
It’s a pity, if email address was provided, the service would be really useful especially for integration with other providers. Without email, integration seems to be quite confusing and awkward.