I sympathize with your frustration; that use case is legitimate.
That said, this is unlikely to ever change. Email addresses are not just the identifying property of contacts, but the foundation upon which most of the CRM is built. Removing the deduplicating power of email would affect every other tool and necessitate restructuring all HubSpot products.
If you do need "duplicate" contact records to work off as brokers, however, you could create a new contact with the original contact's email as long as you append +something before the domain.
For example, if the original contact is johnny.appleseed@example.com, HubSpot would allow you to create a contact with the email johnny.appleseed+1@example.com, as well as johnny.appleseed+2@example.com, etc. Gmail (and I believe other mail servers) will still deliver these emails to johnny.appleseed@example.com.
I have the same issue right now, I seriously think you should consider that the clients need the ability to change the primary key of a list or table. Currently I have customer couples registered with different phone numbers and same email address and the +1 method didn't work, thanks
I have a question about the primary key, can we use our database users id as a primary key instead of an email address ? the only problem for us for using an email address is that if the user signs up with apple or Facebook we don't have any email address from our customer! I'm looking forward to your solution.
Did you manage to find a work-around for this issue?
We too have the need to use the same email for multiple users whose companies are in different industries. Currently it's cumbersome to filter on the contacts/industries, identify those contacts who don't have an email in their email property but we know another contact in a different industry is this companies point of contact, phaff about to send separate emails to these other contacts.
We've not tried adding the +something. Has this method work for anyone?
I sympathize with your frustration; that use case is legitimate.
That said, this is unlikely to ever change. Email addresses are not just the identifying property of contacts, but the foundation upon which most of the CRM is built. Removing the deduplicating power of email would affect every other tool and necessitate restructuring all HubSpot products.
If you do need "duplicate" contact records to work off as brokers, however, you could create a new contact with the original contact's email as long as you append +something before the domain.
For example, if the original contact is johnny.appleseed@example.com, HubSpot would allow you to create a contact with the email johnny.appleseed+1@example.com, as well as johnny.appleseed+2@example.com, etc. Gmail (and I believe other mail servers) will still deliver these emails to johnny.appleseed@example.com.