Skip Navigation
Expand
Duplicate Contact Detected - Contact matches another exactly
Answer ID 5848   |   Last Review Date 01/13/2019

How do I resolve the "duplicate contact detected" informational message?

Environment:

Sites with Email Address Sharing enabled

Issue:

The login field was included in the simplistic duplicate criteria to include:

{(Email Address) OR (First Name) OR (Last Name)} AND {(Login)}

The complete algorithm can be found in the version specific documentation or the answer related to Householding - email address sharing When attempting to create a duplicate contact that violates these conditions, a prompt stating the following will occur:

"This contact exactly matches another contact's first name, last name, email and login values and cannot be saved at this time."

Resolution:

In order to create a duplicate contact for the same email address, you will need to make one of the fields unique.  Generally, the login field will be specific to the individual and will not be shared.

Cause:

In older versions contacts were allowed to have duplicate login values even though it was not best practice.  If email address sharing was enabled, it was possible to have a duplicate contact record sharing first_name, last_name, email, and login.  Upon upgrading to November 2012 or later, these contacts must be either merged, deleted, or modify one field to be unique.

This change was made in effort to handle functionality for workflows used in the dynamic agent desktop environments.