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Searching contacts on alternate email address
Answer ID 5280   |   Last Review Date 02/10/2020

How can we search all alternative email addresses for a contact?

Environment:

Analytics, Contacts, Alternate Email
Oracle B2C Service

Issue:

We have a customer, xxx@xxx.com, whose login name has set itself to "xxx@xxx.com.0001" which indicates that there must already be an account on the system with the same email address. I have searched but cannot find it. The last time I saw this it was caused by another contact record that had one if it's alternate email addresses set to that address.

Can you please search all the alternative email addresses on the system to find the email address xxx@xxx.com? I have looked for a report to be able to do this and cannot find one.

Resolution:

In regards to searching for a contact's alternate email address, no standard reports have this search option by default. However, you can simply copy and edit the standard report "Contact Search" (report_id 8000) to include this option as one of the search criteria. To create the edited report, please follow the instructions below:

  1. From the Reports Explorer, search for standard report "Contact Search". Right-click and select copy.
  2. Open the report in Edit mode.
  3. From the ribbon, select the Home tab and click the Filters button.
  4. In the pop up box, select "Add Filter" from the Actions menu.
  5. Type contacts.any_email into the expression box
  6. Select "like" from the Operator dropdown
  7. Click OK, save the report and run it

Edit report, add filter, enter contacts.any_email for the Expression and select the like operator.  Click ok out of the filters, save the report. Generate it to test.



The edited report will now contain an additional search criteria where you can search through every email field including the alternate email addresses. Please note, as the 'like' operator was selected for the any email field search, this can search for any string of text contained within the entire email address, but remember to place the % symbol to append the wildcard search function. e.g. If searching for email addresses containing the word 'clive', place this in % symbols to search for any email address containing this string - %clive%


For further information regarding filter 'expressions', a good resource to refer to is the data dictionary which explains all the fields in detail. Useful information regarding filters can be accessed by following the instructions in the link below: