Duplicate emails with generic email addresses (info@yourcompany.com)

[Lguerra]

We are currently in the process of dedupping our Dynamics environment before we sync over contacts. The biggest issue we are facing are generic email address that are attached to multiple contacts. (i.e. purchasing@company.com) There are many cases of multiple people being attached to the same email address. Obviously we aren't the only company faced with this issue. 

Obviously this needs to be resolved but their are some small companies that only use generic emails. Knowing that HubSpot requires a unique identifier to sync to our CRM, how do companies around this problem? 

Some use cases:  Customer A & Customer B both use a generic email address. HubSpot is synced to Customer B. Customer A creates a sample request, but since that customer is not in HubSpot they don't receive our sample request automation emails. 

[darynsmith · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lguerra  

It is not currently possible to have duplicate email addresses in HubSpot, a possible workaround for you is to create the primary contact with an email address and then the secondary contacts have no email address.

You can make email address a non-mandatory field, it mentions it here.

And then create a custom field to capture the email address against the secondary contacts. 

[Laura2020]

Hi @Lguerra ,  Just wondered if you had managed to find a solution/workaround to the duplicate email issue that you have mentioned?  We are also having problems with this, which are leading to significant manual intervention, and not allowing us to use Hubspot to its full potential

[Lguerra]

Hi @Laura2020 

We sort of have a solution. We are going to shut down the incoming of generic email addresses by requiring the email addresss to be unique moving forward. We are undecided as to what to do backwards.  It is possible to add a variant to the end of the email address, by adding a + before the @ symbol  (i.e  sales+user1@yourcompany.com, sales+user2@yourcompany.com) 

If you aren't familiar with that, you can add that to the end of any email address and it will still go to the same mailbox. The issue is, it would be customer facing, so you would have to hide the email field in any form used. It wouldn't be updateable by the customer. We are undecided if that is what we are going to do.

[darynsmith]

Unfortunately that +tag feature is not supported by all email server software and even when it is supported administrators don't always enable the feature. It works on Gmail and a few other mail servers as far as I know, such as sendmail and postfix, but it is not ubiquitous.

[npattillo]

I am having this issue, too. Unfortunately, adding another name still does not associate the contacts' communication individually...