Wrestling With Email Address Limitations

Dynamics CRM has been around for a while (about 13 years) and, as is the way with any software, there are a few design features from the old days which linger today. One of those is how email addresses are treated for Accounts, Contacts, and Leads.

How Emails Work in CRM

Basically, for an Account, Contact, or Lead you have three email addresses: emailaddress1, emailaddress2, and emailaddress3. All three are used for linking Activities to records but you can only email out using emailaddress1.

When the smartest developers in the room built Microsoft CRM 1.0, they decided that the product would email a record and not an email address, and the email address used by that record would always be emailaddress1. If you type in an arbitrary email address in the CRM form, it will error, as it expects a record.

Naturally, some customers want to go beyond these limits…