Different records with the same email address

[ShannonP276]

Hi. We have donors who unfortunately share email addresses and as they are individuals they need to receive emails based on them and not just the email address. That may not make sense. So only 1 individual with the email address was brought over to your system and is now in the lists to get emails for whatever list the email is associated with despite the fact that that 1 individual may not be on that list. I was told today to use the work around of adding " 1" before the @ symbol on the emails of the donors not in CC. While I can do this to the 360 records It would be better customer service if that was built into your system. I should never know this is an issue. Your system should sure give the first record that it comes across the original email but for every record that follows it should add that little it to make sure the records are all brought over and sending to the correct lists. I'm amazed that this isn't already built in. Please add this. Please, Pretty Please!

[Frankie_P]

Hi @ShannonP276

What are some cases where more than one contact would want to use the same email address?

[ShannonP276]

Hi Frankie - 

Well we have couples and families who use the same email address (annoying I know) but they are individual constituents with individual records and are in different lists based on things like membership, volunteering, board membership, and other interests. We need them to remain individuals with the correct merge field info despite the fact that it is the same email address. We have over 360+ constituents like this. It would be great if they had and used their own email address but we are not going to be able to convince people of a certain age to do that. They want one email for both of them and that's that. I wish I could just blame people of a certain age for this but I've also run into people in their 30s doing the same thing. 

This issue was discovered yesterday when we had a constituent call us and complain that they were sent an email to renew their membership despite the fact they renewed a few weeks ago. They did renew and shouldn't get that email but their spouse was lapsed and was the person intended to get that email. However, your system by passed that record in the upload from DonorPerfect and added all the list info to their spouse's record so now they get both active and lapsed member emails while the spouse receives none. This is a problem.

[Frankie_P]

Hi @ShannonP276

Thanks for following up with these details! We can't guarantee a commitment to deliver on the idea but we do want to indicate some awareness that we have heard your feedback and are continuing to collect both requests along with other use case examples. 

[ShannonP276]

@Frankie_P

Thank you. I understand but if you aren't going to implement this you should at the very least alert people to this issue with some kind of report. As I said I will be manually adding +a number to all the duplicates that I currently know about but this problem will continue and we will be blind to it as our database service does not have an easy report to catch and export these records for manual fixes. Right now its a case with their engineers to pull the list for me. It's been 3 days and I haven't heard anything back from them. This is a big issue from us and I'm sure it's happening to other orgs but they have no idea it's happening until someone complains...

[JohnA522]

I also have this issue with some companies having up to five different contacts share the same email address and need to send them leveled emails based on their status even though each contact may have different status, they still share the same email address. 

[katumana]

it would also be super helpful if we could create households & relationships across contacts. 

AND allow for the same email to be used for multiple contacts or allow there to be contacts without emails.

[Caitlin_M]

Thank you for your post. This idea is not on our current roadmap. If we have news to share, it will be posted here