Username Formatting Options

Most email addresses and user accounts across the Rentec Direct platform must be unique in order to allow each user to log in to the system. For example, a tenant's email address cannot be entered the same as an owner's email address as this would create a conflict and cause problems for one of them when logging in.

Many Rentec Direct clients run into this when testing. For example, you might create a tenant in the system for test purposes and enter your own email address as the tenant's email. This would generate an error because your own email address is already associated with your Rentec Direct account. There are also non-test related circumstances where an email conflict can occur such as if a tenant moves from one property manager who uses Rentec Direct to another, and the tenant has not been archived in the prior manager's system yet.

When adding or editing any accounts in the system, the system will automatically check if there is a username or email conflict and notify you. To overcome this, there are a couple solutions:

Use email plus addressing. This feature is available on most email platforms and is the preferred solution. (see below)
If you are adding or editing your Rentec Direct account, or a Manager account, you can use any alphanumeric combination for the username, it does not need to be an email address. For example, a unique username of "john.smith12345" would work.
For tenants or owner accounts, if the recipients email provider does not support plus addressing, they will need to supply an alternate email address.

Email Plus Addressing

Email plus addressing allows you to use an address variation or an existing email account without needing to create a new email address.

For example, if the email you want to use is johndoe@example.com, you can create a temporary alias by adding a plus sign at the end of the name.

In this case, if you have a tenant and their email address is already elsewhere in the Rentec Direct system, you could use johndoe+tenant@example.com. The benefit of this is that you don't need to create an entirely new email address, and both addresses will go to the same mailbox, so the account can continue to check their email in only one location.

You can easily test any email to see if it supports email plus addressing by sending an email to the recipient with the plus addressing applied. For example, if I wanted to test our customer service mailbox I would send an email to success+test@rentecdirect.com and check if it was received.