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Why does Chat include a generic email address for the customer?

Environment:

Chat - End-user Pages, Customer Portal

Resolution:

All chats should be launched with some information to identify whether the chat was launched by an existing or new contact. The fields that are available to do this are First Name, Last Name, and Email Address.

If a chat is launched without any of this information, the product will automatically designate the chat as having an email address of anonymous@anonymous.invalid. The value of this email address can be changed and it is stored in a message base named ANONYMOUS_AT_ANONYMOUS_INVALID_LBL.

In versions November 2009 and later, the Chat pages were redesigned so that they could be customized through Customer Portal. With these changes, new precautions should be made to ensure that contacts cannot launch a chat without required contact information.

The standard chat pages are located in WebDav in the app/chat directory. The page names are chat_launch and chat_landing. If you require login to launch a chat, you must ensure that the meta tag includes the login_required = true parameter on both of these pages. If this is only done on the chat_launch page, you will be able to access the chat_landing page directly without logging in and without filling out any required fields.

If you do access the app/chat/chat_landing page directly, they will likely create a chat that will be associated to the anonymous@anonymous.invalid contact record.

In versions May 2010 and later, additional functionality was added so that you can require specific contact fields to be provided when a chat is launched. If a field is missing, a message will be displayed stating: "One or more required contact fields are missing. Please review all fields and re-submit the chat request." The First Name, Last Name and/or Email Address fields can be set to required. This is done when calling the standard ChatServerConnect widget in the chat_landing page code. Simply set the appropriate parameters to true when calling the widget. The name of each parameter is: first_name_required, last_name_required, email_required.