Email Best Practice when People Leave/Change Companies

Hi @SethD, thanks for posting! I totally understand why you would want to keep a record of the old email address. There are a couple of common ways to store old email addresses on a Person record. But before we dive in, I wanna talk more about this point:

It seems to make sense from a historical records perspective to keep existing (obsolete) email addresses in a People record so Activity associated with that address remains.

Actually, if you remove an email address from a Person record, those previously synced emails will remain associated! When the system processes the emails for the first time, it attaches it to that Person record, not just the email address that was involved. So if you remove an old email address from a Person record, you’ll still be able to see those old emails!

But you still might have other reasons for wanting to keep their previous email address. So let’s go through our options for doing that.

Option 1: Save those email addresses under the type “Other.” Usually, someone’s current working email is saved as “Work Email”. So you would just need to change the email type to “Other.” The pro is that this is the easiest approach - you just have to toggle the email type. The con is that your users will have to be aware that they should not be using any email address marked “Other.”

Option 2: create a custom text field for previous emails and copy/paste those old emails in. This way they will be clearly labelled as former email addresses. And, if you have a lot of old emails for a contact, it’s a much more clear and compact way to store it. Downside - you would need to manually copy/paste their email here when they move companies.

You could also create and pin a note for the contact with their former email addresses, although that would be some added work.

Anyways let me know what you think :)