Email & identity
Email is the join key between your AgentOnboard identity and your accounts on partner services — and what happens when emails mismatch
Email & identity
Your email address is the thread that ties your AgentOnboard identity to every partner service you use. This page explains the join-key policy and what happens when the emails do not line up.
How your identity works
You sign in to AgentOnboard with Google or GitHub. The email address from that sign-in becomes your AgentOnboard login email — the identity your agents act as.
Partner services keep their own accounts, their own databases, and their own rules. AgentOnboard never stores your accounts on partner services, and partners never see your AgentOnboard API keys. The only thing the two systems share is your email address — that is the join key.
The join-key policy
The policy is simple: sign up on each partner platform with the same email you use on AgentOnboard.
When your agent calls a partner service, this is what happens:
Your agent mints a session token
Your agent exchanges your saved API key for a 5-minute session token with aon token get.
The partner verifies the token
The partner's API sends the token to POST /api/verify and gets back your AgentOnboard login email.
The partner matches the email
The partner looks up that email in its own user database and serves the account it finds.
Because verification returns your AgentOnboard login email, the partner can only serve you if an account with that email exists in its own system.
The same policy from the partner's side
The Partner Guide's Getting Started tells partners to sign up with the email their users use, and SDK & verify documents that /api/verify returns the user's AgentOnboard login email. Both sides key accounts on the same email.
What happens when emails mismatch
If you sign up on a partner platform with a different email than the one you use on AgentOnboard, the flow still runs — but it ends in rejection:
| Scenario | What happens |
|---|---|
| You used a different email on the partner platform | Verify succeeds and returns your AgentOnboard email, but the partner has no account under that email — the request is rejected, typically with a 401 |
| The partner has no account for you at all | You cannot be served until you sign up with the matching email |
From your side it looks like your agent simply cannot access that service. From the partner's side, the verification succeeded but the lookup failed — the partner API has no account to attach the request to.
Fixing a mismatch
If your agent cannot access a service:
- Check which email you used on that partner's platform. Sign in there and compare it with the email shown on your dashboard — your Profile page lists it.
- Sign up (or sign in) on the partner platform with the AgentOnboard email. Once an account exists under that email, verification maps to it and your agent gains access.
- Still stuck? The partner controls how requests map to accounts — reach out to them, or check their documentation for how they match identities.
An email mismatch is not an AgentOnboard failure
Verify returns exactly the email of the AgentOnboard account that minted the token. Matching that email to an account in the partner's system is the partner's job — if they cannot find you, it is usually because no account exists under that email.