When profile matches on email and the email that matches is not the primary, it overwrites the primary giving the same email repeated

Question

We have a profile for registering people. It is set to match on email. If an existing contact fills out the form but say uses their billing email address and not the one set as their primary, it matches fine. Great, but then it overwrites the primary with what they just entered. Now we've lost their "primary" email address and have the same email address listed twice, once as billing and once as home.

Is there some nice easy way around this? I'm I missing something?

I suppose I could create another type and set the profile for that. Would still end up with the same address twice but wouldn't loose the other. Or maybe a db trigger to skip the write to the email table if the email address already exists for that user.

Ah, the tangled web we create when we allow contacts to mess with their data.

Answer 1

When you create a profile and add Email fields, you can choose which email address the field should represent (Home, Main, Work etc). You could provide both email address fields in the form and label them accordingly. It's not perfect, but might at least make some users more aware of which email address they are supplying.