Duplicate Email Addresses

Two complications dealing with member's email address will be multiple members sharing an email address and members with multiple email addresses. The first cannot be avoided. The second, where one member simply wants to use different email addresses for different purposes, can be met with a polite but firm no.

For performance reasons it helps to have an index of email addresses to access the member record. One complication is multiple members with the same email address. While email addresses are guaranteed to be unique across the Internet, unfortunately it is not uncommon for several persons in very small companies to share a single email address. Over time this situation will surely get better but it may be a very long time before associations can count on not having multiple members with the same email address. An organization could adopt a policy and build systems to enforce it so that the same email address is not allowed to be entered into multiple records. If so, be prepared to deal with the few angry members who think one email address per company is sufficient and want their email address listed for each of their members.

If you do allow multiple records to contain the same email address, then you need to decide whether all members with that email address need to meet the criteria for the lists or if any one is sufficient or possibly if there are multiple conditions can they be ANDed across two or more records.

The decision to allow or not allow continued list membership is likely to be simple compared to deciding what to do about duplicates. List membership eligibility will probably directly mirror your definitions of a current member and which benefits go with which member types. If the email address can't be located in a member record or belongs to a member who is lapsed or not eligible to participate in the list, then you remove the email address from the list via the list API. Maintaining good member relationships, requires that email addresses removed from lists be notified of this fact. We had three different messages: 1) for email address that could not be matched to a member record; 2) for lapsed members and 3) for current members whose type or types was not eligible to be in the specific list. The similar situation likely to affect many associations are lists that go with special interest group or section memberships with the requirement that only current section group members may participate in the list.

Above I mentioned email address with regards to directory listings. In addition to dealing with the same email address in multiple records, you're almost sure to face some members who want multiple email addresses in their records. I've encountered both persons who wanted different email addresses for their directory listings and another for use with list servers as well as persons who wanted different email addresses in different list servers. The former is much more likely as many small companies have domains that they don't administer and email sent to their domain gets to them but email sent out comes with an ISP or other access provider's email address. This creates a situation that many list servers won't allow but the member's naturally want their own domain listed in directories. The second situation is very difficult to accommodate unless your system is very flexible and complicated.

ATLA's member database is actually capable of storing an open ended number of email addresses. The problem arises when you start to use multiple email addresses and is at least as much procedural as technical. If you have more than one, when do you use which and how do you make sure that all staff who can enter or retrieve the email addresses know when to use which. Despite some complaints, ATLA decided to allow only one email address per member. The number of complaints we received was miniscule (though over time this may have changed) but those who did object to having only a single email address tended to be very unhappy about the situation. As an organization begins to collect a significant percentage of email addresses for its members there is a constantly growing pressure to use them in an increasing number of ways and the more email addresses you have per record the harder it is to manage them.

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