For those who are curious, this was the communication in email thread.



My Reply:

Thanks for getting back to me on this. This is a very bizarre situation. I do not understand a few things here.



Support Team: I've taken a look at your account, and ultimately, the problem is that the email address of your former employer was still attached to the Trello account.

Me: How can a former employer email address be attached to my account? My email was discontinued as I left my workplace a long time back and I have never used that email address. I am very sure I never used it to log in to my account.



Support Team: Because the email address was still on the account, your employer identified it as an account that they should own, and ownership of this Trello account was transferred to your former employer, so no changes can be made to the account, and the company owns that account.

Me: As it is very evident from my login email id, that this account is not owned by the company, wasn't it even considered appropriate to contact me on my email id before transferring the account. How can a company own a private account even if the domain mismatch? How is it not a violation of my privacy terms?

Support Team: Given the account ownership, that's not something that we can do on our end, unfortunately. We can release your personal email which would allow you to create a new account in Trello.

Me: This clearly means I will lose all my data (which is a lot) on my actual account. Looks like it is not a viable solution.



Support Team: In case of any further questions please reach out to the [Comany Name] support team using [Trello support email for comany].

Me: The email to this address bounce back, it is not even active. I am kind of baffled by this situation. Trello is one of my primary tools for organizing information and holds a lot of personal data. Can you please help me resolve this as soon as possible.



Support Team Reply



Thank you for your reply. I also noticed your post in our Community forum - I'll follow up on the thread there, as well, just in case there are other users who might be in the same situation as you are. The answer I'm providing is the same for any Trello user who has an email address on their account that is owned by a Trello Enterprise with enforced SSO.

Right now, you Trello account has 2 email addresses saved as credentials. One of them is your gmail email address and one of them is the email address owned by your former employer, ACME.

I understand your perspective, that having your personal email on file means something - however, the ACME email address is currently on your Trello account as a saved credential. Regardless if the email address still exists right now or not, the email with the ACME claimed domain is on your Trello account as a saved credential. This is the crux of the situation. The ACME Trello Enterprise has enforced SSO, meaning any Trello user with one of their emails as a saved credential must log in with ACME SSO, even if the user also has a personal email address as a saved credential. The reason for this is because The Enterprise has claimed the ACME domain, and therefore, ownership of the Trello accounts containing their credentials, which is something Trello's terms allow Enterprises to do. If you can't log in with their SSO because you no longer have valid credentials with their IdP, I'm afraid you cannot log into the Trello account.

If the company Enterprise Admin consented, then we could remove the Enterprise association from your Trello account, but that's something you'd need to explore with them, if they'd be willing to do that. It's not an uncommon request for Enterprises to hear from former employees in this situation. The support email [Company Trello Support Email] was provided to us by the ACME team, and I'm sorry to hear you got a bounce-back from it. We may recommend to reach out to their HR team, or perhaps try to get connected to a one of the Trello Enterprise admin through any contacts you may still have at the company.

From the Trello support side, we cannot remove the ACME email from your Trello account, nor can we release your account from the Enterprise SSO association. I know that is frustrating for you, and I'm sorry for the inconveniences you've faced in trying to reach ACME about this. If you end up getting in touch with an Enterprise Admin from ACME and they say it's okay for us to remove your account from Enterprise SSO on this thread, we can do that. Without the authorization of an Enterprise Admin, the only option from the Trello support side is to remove your gmail email address from the account so that you can create a new Trello account with it. This would mean that the content within the existing account containing the ACME email address cannot be accessed unless you were to log in with ACME SSO.

If you would like us to remove your gmail email address from the account, you're welcome to request that in a reply anytime.

We'll also be glad to comply with an Enterprise Admin from ACME if they would like to comment on this thread.

Thank you for your understanding, Shashank. Please let me know if you have any additional Trello questions.