Hello all! This topic has come up a few times in the last year or so and from a Product Team perspective, Chelsea and I are trying to gain a sense of the demand here. What do you all think about the option of requiring each member to have their own email address? For example, this would mean that an individual would not be able to register for the website if the email address they use at signup already exists within the site/database on another member record. How do you feel about this as a potential feature? Thanks!

We already require this of our membership, so probably not the best resource for your question. If we didn't have it set up this way already (just by practice), we WOULD want that option.

How would this affect Individual vs Organizational Members if you are using both?
I know our organization would love this as we have many duplicate records, and they just keep coming. However, we use both individual and organization memberships and sometimes the organization contact also has an individual membership, would this mean that they would not be able to exist under the same email address? Ultimately, I think we would prefer that members cannot create duplicate accounts, just curious if any thought was given on the implications for those circumstances.

Thanks for the feedback here! 

Good callout here. That's definitely a consideration and I think the prevailing thought there from a product perspective is that this feature would be optional; admins would have the ability to turn it on/off. So for those orgs that do use master/subs more heavily that might wind up having accounts with duplicate emails, they could still allow that by not using the option.

I'm not 100% sure how this situation would otherwise look, but there may be other ways we could solution for that type of scenario if we were to decide to implement this functionality. 

I'd support allowing an email to only be used on one record.

This would be a huge problem for our organization. We have attorneys who like their emails going to their paralegal first. Some attorneys use the same paralegal; we have many of those. We also have many attorneys that do not want to give us an email.  In those cases, we have to put something in that field since it's required so we use a generic one for everyone.  If this is changed, it's going to cause issues for us.

We would not use it. We have hundreds of families with small children, most of whom don't have their own email addresses. You used to require that the field not be left blank and we had to fill it with a fake email address. Fortunately, that requirement was eventually changed. I can't force each member to have a unique address. If this is added, you need to make certain that our organization has the option to turn it off.

Seconding V. Schriver, this would NOT work at all for our association (which is org-based). That said, I have no problem with it being an option others can use.

Thanks for your feedback! Appreciate it!