Duplicate Contacts Being Created

Help & Questions
1

We have several instances recently where we’re seeing a new contact being created twice with the exact same details and then being added twice as an additional contact.

Looking at the object creation date in AutoTask, they are created at the same time 03/18 10:07 (though to be fair that doesn’t include the seconds).

Initially, I was going to just start with an example of that happening, but when I look at the email history, I see something that I believe indicates what is causing this and I’m looking for the best way to handle it.

For this customer, they have a dedicated mailbox.
What I noticed is that at the time stamp closest to this double creation, the requester sent the email to BOTH the dedicated mailbox AND our general mailbox… They were trying to get something escalated so they started including everyone.

Based on timing of ticket creation and lookup, I think both of these flows may have overlapped each other.

Here’s the IDs of the two “simultaneous” workflows:
17423068054530d - dedicated mailbox
174230681571403 - our support mailbox

I think that I might have to have a rule in the general mailbox that prevents messages from coming in from their sending domain.

2

Thank you for reporting this!

We will include a fix for this behavior in a future update.

In particular, we will add logic to ensure that when searching for an existing contact in Autotask and potentially creating a contact, we will only perform that one-at-a-time for any specific email address. If we receive two emails with the same sender at the same time, like in your example, MSPintegrations would ensure that the second one waits for the first one to fully complete processing before processing it. This should alleviate this issue and ensure that if both emails are received from a never-before-seen email address, that only one email will create a contact.

I appreciate that you posted this question. We are in the midst of working on a major update that includes solutions for similar situations, but we had not identified this exact situation for this new workflow update. You reported this at the perfect time and we will be able to incorporate this into the next major release.