Recovery contacts

A recovery contact is a verified personal email address or phone number attached to your account. It’s how you get back in if you ever lose your password — and it’s the one piece of personal contact info Knobs keeps.

Why they exist

Your login is your knobs address — you@your-team.knobs.io — not a personal email. That’s great for identity, but it means a traditional “we emailed you a reset link” flow would send the link to the very inbox you’re locked out of.

So Knobs does recovery differently: reset codes go to your recovery contact — a personal inbox or phone that exists outside your workspace. That’s also why onboarding won’t complete until you’ve verified one.

If you joined via an invite, the email or phone the invite was sent to was verified as your recovery contact automatically.

Add or manage recovery contacts

1. Open Settings → Security → Recovery contacts.
2. Choose Add contact and enter a personal email address or phone number.
3. Enter the 6-digit code Knobs sends to it. Codes expire after 10 minutes; you can request a fresh one.

Once verified, the contact appears in your list. You can keep several — a personal email and a phone number is a sensible pair — and remove any of them, as long as at least one verified contact remains.

Caution

Keep your recovery contacts current. If you change phone numbers or abandon a personal inbox, update the contact before you lose access to the old one — it’s your only way back in without your password.

Recover your account

If you can’t sign in:

1. On the sign-in screen, enter your knobs address and choose Forgot password.
2. Pick which recovery contact should receive the code.
3. Enter the 6-digit code sent to it (you get a limited number of attempts per code).
4. Set a new password and sign in.

Resetting your password this way also signs out your account’s other sessions, so a compromised password stops working everywhere at once.

Good to know

• Recovery contacts are account-level, not per workspace — one set covers every workspace you belong to.
• They’re used for account verification and recovery, not for mail: your personal inbox won’t receive your workspace’s email.
• Recovery codes are single-purpose and short-lived; Knobs will never ask you to read one back over the phone or in chat.