Multiple Emails for Contacts

Many of the indivduals we are sending our email campaigns to have multiple email addresses (either a personal and work, or a work email and an assistant, sometimes multiple assistants, etc.).  Before, we were able to send the same message to up to three different email addresses under one contact, by labeling the emails as "work", "home" and "other".


Now that Constant Contact has updated and changed their contacts to only having 1 email address per contact, we are unable to properly reach our intended audience.  


This significantly reduces the functionality of Constant Contact for our business and we have already started looking at other options. 


This is one of the issues that is preventing me from using this service.  It is illogical to have multiple records for one person for each email address.  To say that having multiple email addresses per contact leads to a "buggy and confusing experience" just means that you need to fix your software.

makes no sense that I can't add a comma and a second email address to a contact. What about married people? This a basic functionality for $60 a month you should offer.... On top that, I can't even copy the contact or replicate it; I have to type the entire thing over again. Why isn't your design on top of these basic elements?
Occasional Participant

This is a distressing turn. We wholeheartedly agree it should not be policy. Multiple email addresses for ONE contact just makes sense in today's world!



The elimination of multiple email addresses per contact record will lead to massive problems in our database. There are numerous issues with allowing only a single email address per record, as stated repeatedly in this thread.


Of immediate concern to us: when we receive registrations to events, the email address the recipient uses is often different from the one listed on his record. It appears that Email Address is the field contestant contact uses to match records. If the registrant uses the same email address as contained on his contact record, constant contact determines the records match, and updates any new info contained on the registration. But when someone registers using a different email address — maybe his Home address, as opposed to his Work email that’s on his record — a duplicate record is created. This is a big problem, now, but our database currently contains only a few hundred records. As it grows, this problem will quickly be magnified. People typically maintain multiple email addresses, so this must be accounted for in Constant Contact.


Constant contact must return to allowing multiple email addresses per contact record. When someone registers for an event, constant contact should attempt to match the email address on the registration with each one on the contact record, and update the record, if necessary, with new data.


Constant contact is a useful tool, but this is is a critical flaw. If it is not corrected, I will switch to another product that accounts for multiple email addresses per record. I’m certain that I am hardly alone in this, as evident in the many comments in this thread.

Real Estate

Agreed with every single comment here. If the additional e-mail field was causing issues with certain customers, the work around should never be "remove the feature"


I am on the verge of canceling CC for a variety of problems. Mailchimp may be my next stop.


I agree with the above statements.  Our organization will need to consider working with another program.  This will not fit our needs.

Regular Participant

This is definitely an issue for my organization.   


Wow, I didn't know this was a past feature that was removed. This was a poor decision and greatly

limits the functionality and increases our number of contacts needlessly

the change you made making email the key ID for a record rather than being able to have a contact with multiple email addresses makes the tool harder and harder to use to manage a database of contacts. All these changes are really moving backwards instead of forward in functionality.  


Managing contacts is impossible due to there only being one email per person.  Why would a single person have 2 records?!  We will also be looking for alternatives...


PLEASE add this back. Voting was opened in 2016 and this "certifed good idea" is still not implemented. Looking into a competitor (Mail Chimp) that would double/triple charge me for multiple emails for one contact. Ridiculous

Occasional Participant
I'd like to have the capability of attaching the same email address to two different people. I have some couples who share an email address and I'm not able to put them both on my list, separately. Thanks.

I agree with the others on this feature. We're going to have to look at other platforms. We are in a university setting. A portion of my list is alumni who we want to stay in contact with. We have their professional emails for the companies they work with, but they often provide us with a personal account. We want the ability to stay in contact with our alumni base when they change jobs every few years. Creating multiple accounts doesn't make sense for us -- we need to see their complete record as one.


I agree! Please add this feature back!

Frequent Participant

Please pass on to the tech people who made the decision about only 1 email per record: Constant Contact is a people-based database. One person can have multiple street addresses, multiple phone numbers, and multiple email addresses. Their uniqueness is perhaps name, plus some other characteristics. Their uniqueness is not email address. For database integrity, an external key (record id?) should be created (and maybe hidden from the user). Do not force the user world to bend data needs to technical needs. The presence or absence of a email address should not determine whether a record can be added. Splitting a person's identity into 2 because of 2 email addresses is not fitting for the real world. And it makes data maintenance and accuracy difficult. For example: A person changes a street address and we have to find all their records and do multiple updates. And a 2nd email address comes along and we have to copy all the other data to the new record just to hold the new email address. It worked much better for the real world the way it was, when a person could have multiple email addresses. Consider going back to that please before you do all the work of splitting everybody apart. Thanks.

Frequent Participant

The decision to require 1 and only 1 email address per contact is causing a lot of extra work and data gyrations. This appears to be a technical decision based on technical needs, which is causing problems for users to manage and understand and use their contact data directly as people-world and reality would expect.  Please stop this direction, and go back.


This situation is especially true, only in reverse for organizations that deal with children, schools, clubs, etc. where an parents email address is used to send information concerning a child. It used to be available to have one email associated to multiple contacts. Ie. moms email was used for john in the third grade and sally in the 6th grade. Mom , Sally and John were each individual contacts with the same email address. Sally was on a list titled 6th grade and John was on a list titled 3rd grade.

 The 3rd grade teacher could send a notice to the class list with the greeting dear John and John's mother would receive the email seeing it was addressed to John. She knew immediately that the email was from his 3rd grade teacher.

 Conversely the Principal could send an email to the entire school and with CC policy of not sending duplicate email to the same address Mom would receive only one email regarding all her children.

 Today this is not possible . To send information information specific to an individual child requires that child to have their own personal email, which even today is is still not the norm.


Please bring back the ability of one person having multiple emails, and one email having multiple contacts. I worked so much better for those of us who deal with families.



We have 2 e mail addresses for each of our contacts, and as we progress through setting up our contacts we discovered we cannot send, or store some of the addresses. This is more than frustrating and we may have to look at other options for e mail, event, and campaign set up. Some of the lists do have some duplication, depending on the chain store we are working with. This needs to also be incorporated. 


Please figure out a way to allow multiple people (eg: members of one family) to have one email but allow me to enter separate names and birthdays for EACH member.  Thanks




I just left mailchimp - I was forced to switch and was pretty upset.  Was very happy to move back to Constant Contact - but finding out I can't add multiple emails for one contact any more is not ideal.  But since people have been complaining for more than a few years - I guess you are not going to address this - 

Since I've been working in the Constant Contact software program in the last day or two, I have discovered a lot of things resulting in a long list of questions for Customer Service, which I called today.  I am following up our conversation in writing to ensure it gets to your software developers ASAP.


I have to say that if I had been one of the individuals evaluating whether to change to Constant Contact or choose some other program for CCRP last fall, I would have definitely gone with some other program.  There are such basic things that it prevents you from doing, or should have in place that do not exist and it has been really frustrating.  And believe me, I have worked in dozens of types of software programs for the last few decades, including working with software developers for custom software programs, and Constant Contact is so minimally basic that I just don't give it high marks at all. I provided feedback to your Customer Service team on the following (annoying) items today:


  1. Each contact is only allowed one email address, and no others can be added - this is stupid (unlike our iPhone contacts which can retain multiple email addresses).  You should at least be able to add multiple email addresses as well as choose whether it's primary or secondary, but this program does neither.
  2. Contacts without email addresses cannot be added.  This means that if we want to maintain  list of all contacts without email addresses, it must be kept separately in a spreadsheet, other program, or you can add a "dummy/fake" email into Constant Contact because otherwise the system won't even let you save it,  which again, is so stupid and defeats the purpose of maintaining all types of contacts for an organization or business.  There should be some type of flag or checked box that you can identify on each record for those without email addresses, but of course there is none. 
  3. I've seen several existing multiple (same) contacts that should be merged or consolidated.  Unfortunately, Constant Contact does not have a feature to merge contacts (unlike our iPhone contacts which can allows contact data to be merged).  The actual contact name that you do not want must be deleted individually, and then the data that you do want to keep manually input into the other contact that you want to retain. 
  4. "Notes" cannot be deleted or edited after hitting enter - again, a really stupid, basic item that should be allowed.
  5. And this is a key critical one - If a contact is added that currently exists with a different name but the same email address, the system automatically overrides the data to the new name when you hit save, which is so stupid!  What it should do before saving is provide a warning message that says, 'An account already exists with this email address.  Are you sure you want to save?' but it does not.  So in essence, you have already overwritten the old data without not even knowing that it existed in the first place.  This is just bad, bad, bad programming.

Hmm, I am allowed to have multiple emails for one person. They are each a separate contact. What I cant have and would like to have back is the ability to have multiple names - such as family members - attached to one email

Whenever I update from a .vcf file (I'm using a Mac), I'm having trouble with emails. It used to be that any email entered in Contacts (work, home, "other") would default to the "email address" column in the import; as of a few months ago (possibly when I switched to the newest version of Contacts?), it adds a separate column for each email address. Worse, it then doesn't let me label the additional columns as email addresses, and my imports end up with missing people. I can't import one by one, and I can't always upload multiple times and switch which column is the email address, since some people have work and home addresses, and I don't want them uploaded twice. Please either let me know a way to work around this, or change the upload to have multiple email options.

We send emails to Credit Union members on behalf of the Credit Union. In many cases members share email address such as Jane Smith and Joe Smith both using the email address "". When we need to send specific information to members we have to make two or more passes so that each person gets their specific information. It would be extremely helpful if we had the option to NOT de-duplicate lists based on the email address.

Frequent Participant
It would be helpful if: Fields for more than 1 email address More than 1 field for companies (some clients have more than 1) Fields for client number (more than 1)
Frequent Participant
We have clients with multiple companies that use the same email address. I'm not able to add an additional company with the same email and the company field is too small to add more names in that field. I need to be able to add the email address more than once.
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