While email address information can be recorded for all participant types, person and prospect person email addresses are maintained as evidence. A person or prospect person can have a personal or business email address type, and multiple instances of each type are also allowed. ‘From’ and ‘To’ dates are used to record the period during which a particular email address is valid. The details of an email address do not change over time. While an individual might stop using a particular email address, the details of that email address do not change. For this reason, when maintaining email address information in the system, users must either create new records or correct existing records and successions are not allowed.
Email address records brokered from another case are processed automatically. In order to do this, the system checks the incoming record to determine whether the system should treat the email address as a new record, , modify an existing email address or consider it a duplicate of an email address already held. If the email address is deemed to be a duplicate (where all attributes on the record match an existing email address record held) no updates are made.
In order to determine whether to add a new record or modify an existing one, the system first checks whether there is an existing record that is logically identical. Logically identical means that a number of attributes match the incoming record - in this case this would include 'email type' and 'address'. If the attributes match, the system then updates the existing record held with the details on the incoming record (where the incoming record has the latest received date). If none of the attributes match, the system will add this as a new email address.