Trigger a notification when contact's email address is changed because of email forwarding

[Rosanne]

When an email is forwarded, the first person's contact information is automatically updated with the second persons' information because the second contact becomes associated with the original email recipient's tracking cookie.)

Currently, the ways to avoid this involve disabling email tracking or disabling cookie tracking on forms.

Since these options require that you give up valuable tracking information on all contacts, we are looking for an automated notification to marketing when a contact's email address is changed. This would provide us the chance to review the contact to see if the change was due to email forwarding and be able to save both the original and second contacts. 

[kaburke · Accepted solution]

Hey! If you want a notification each time a contact's email address is updated, please see below.

Start with creating a custom number property 'Email address updated'. This property will record the number of times an email is changed on a contact.

To capture the number of times this property is updated we next need to create a system to count this for your records. Create a workflow whereby you have a criterion that enrols contacts that have the property 'email' is known. The re-enrollment options are set to re-enrol contacts whereby the contact property 'email' is known. Essentially what this means is that when the system sees there has been an update to the 'email' property it will pull a contact into this workflow.

The next step in the workflow is to increase 'email address updated' by 1'. Next workflow step is if/then branch of 'The contact property 'Email address Updated' is greater than 1' and finally down the yes branch sent internal notification. This workflow will increase the contact property value by 1 each time that the record goes through this workflow.

When the property is greater than one an internal email can be sent to an internal contact who will be able to manually segment the contact which has been overwritten.