Having more than one LuxID Account

Can you have more than one LuxID Account?

Yes. You can have more than one LuxID Account if that works better for you - for example, one for your personal life and a separate one for work. You do not need to ask LuxID or contact support to do this. Just create each account the normal way. See Create a LuxID Account.

There is one rule to keep in mind: each account needs its own unique email address. Your email address is your LuxID identifier - the way you sign in - so no two accounts can share the same one.

When more than one account makes sense

A second account is useful when you want to keep two identities cleanly separate:

• Personal and professional. Keeping your private sign-ins apart from your work ones.
• Managing services for someone else. If you help an elderly relative or someone less comfortable with technology, the services behind LuxID usually expect one account per person - so that person needs their own LuxID Account, with their own email address.

One email per account, and the alias trick

Because every account needs its own email address, managing several accounts can mean checking several mailboxes. There is a shortcut that avoids that, if your email provider supports it: email aliases.

An alias adds a keyword after a + sign in the part before the @, and messages still arrive in your normal inbox. For example, if your address is yourname@gmail.com, you could register accounts with yourname+mum@gmail.com and yourname+club@gmail.com. To LuxID these are different, unique addresses, but the emails all land in your one real inbox.

Providers known to support this include gmail.com, icloud.com, and outlook.com. Check your provider's help pages to confirm, as availability can change.

You manage the email address on each account from LuxID Account (opens in a new tab) > Account. See Manage your email addresses.

Accounts cannot be merged

LuxID does not support merging two accounts into one. If you have ended up with more than one account and would rather have just one, the approach is:

1. Decide which account you want to keep.
2. On the account you are keeping, add any information, phone numbers, or security methods you need from the other one.
3. Reconnect any apps and services to the account you are keeping.
4. Once you are sure you no longer need the other account, you can delete it.

There is no automatic transfer, so move anything important across manually before deleting the account you are leaving behind.

Do not share one account across a team or family

A LuxID Account is meant for one person. It can be tempting for a small team, a club, or a family to set up a single shared account, but this causes a real problem: if everyone relies on one account and one phone for 2-Step Verification, then the moment the person holding that phone is unavailable - on holiday, off sick, or simply out of reach - everyone is locked out.

Give each person their own LuxID Account, each with their own email address and their own second factor.

If an organisation needs to manage accounts and access for many people centrally, that is exactly what LuxID Pro, the enterprise federation service, is for. See Manage your LuxID Pro account.

Switching between your accounts

If you have more than one account, you sign in to whichever one you need by signing out of the current account first and signing back in with the other email address. LuxID does not (yet) let you stay signed in to several accounts at the same time and switch between them.