I’ve recently been doing by some minor declutterring of my vinyl collection, hoping to sell some records on Discogs. As part of the process, I needed to link my PayPal account to my Discogs account. Simple enough, right? Not quite. I hit a roadblock when Discogs repeatedly threw an “Invalid Email” error at me.
Some searching around their support pages and Reddit suggested my PayPal account was the issue: Discogs only support Verified PayPal accounts. That’s odd, though: my account has been in use since George W. Bush was president and is verified by way of multiple confirmed bank accounts.
I reached out to Discogs support, hoping for a quick fix, but was instead directed to their Terms of Service with a vague suggestion that I might be in breach. Puzzled, I tried creating a brand new PayPal account using a different email address from privacy-focused provider FastMail.com, only to encounter the same error.
So I contacted support again. Their response? “Your email domains cannot be confirmed as valid … try using Gmail.” Wow. Surely my decades-old email domain is perfectly valid!
Nevertheless, I decided to play along. I added a Gmail address to my existing PayPal account and attempted to link it to Discogs. To my surprise, it worked without a hitch.
While the workaround was ultimately successful, the process left me a bit surprised.
Hopefully this helps someone who comes across the same issue with an otherwise “valid” PayPal account.