Strip content between "+" and "@" when applying dedupe logic for email addresses

An increasingly popular feature in Gmail and other providers is the ability to add descriptive text by including a "+" sign in email address without impacting the deliverability of messages. For example, John Doe receives messages sent to both johndoe@gmail.com and johndoe+koresuggestion@gmail.com. However, ticket brokers are using this formatting option to create multiple accounts and bypass account-level ticket quotas. I believe that stripping the characters between the two symbols would be beneficial for merging/deduping contacts and prevent extra work for our sales staff.

The source of the issue is also waiting to be resolved on the ticketing side, but we have hundreds of affected contacts with these types of Gmail addresses. An analysis of accounts with this behavior showed that the overwhelming majority would benefit from being merged. Other addresses can be handled manually - issues may come up, but only after rep engagement, at which point the sales rep can split the account to a new contact via Ticketing Data Manager. Working backwards in this process isn't as efficient.

Articles explaining the behavior can be found here and here.

  • Guest
  • May 18 2020
  • Future consideration
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