Contact form duplicate detection now reads the request, not just the address

Published August 3, 2026

In this series · Part 6 of 27

1Dynamics 365 CRM: API integration + change-control repo 2Dynamics 365 CRM: Last Contact Engagement tracking on Accounts 3Turning a sales-intelligence export into a clean CRM data model 4Dynamics 365 CRM: contacts inherit their company’s website, and emails timestamp by send time 5Your SEO health now lives as a dashboard inside the CRM 6Contact form duplicate detection now reads the request, not just the address 7Marketing list members now show engagement and account fit 8Campaign responses now create leads behind a confirmation step 9Three CRM automations passed their tests without running the code that had just changed 10A signature defect that three mailboxes agreed was not there 11Why a corrected email signature kept sending the old one 12A read-only CRM endpoint for scoring outside the desktop 13Choosing what runs the AI layer in the CRM sales process 14Asking whether a partner is involved, instead of inferring it 15An email step in the sales process can now be excused, not only sent 16The rehearsal that guards every process change had been failing silently 17A one to one email from a lead left the engagement record blank 18Two local dependencies, and only one was obvious 19Filing a generated document to the record automatically 20One meeting that served two process steps, recorded as two 21A setting that stored correctly, read back correctly, and was never in force 22Generating a product catalogue from one canonical file 23Three date fields that existed on every row, and had never once been written 24Unused, unreferenced, and still not safe to delete 25A measure that could not record early 26A sales automation that runs as itself, not as an administrator 27A stage change that was refused, and reported as a success

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The website contact form creates a Lead in the CRM, and until now it decided whether a submission was a duplicate by comparing the email address as a plain string. That was wrong in two opposite directions at the same time, and both were live. A returning prospect asking about something new was filed as a repeat and never became a Lead, so genuinely new interest went into the record as a note instead of the pipeline. Meanwhile one person writing in from x@, x+something@ and a capitalised spelling of the same address became three separate Leads, because nothing tidied the address before comparing it. The fix addresses both, and it is now live.

Addresses are normalised before they are compared. The address is trimmed and lowercased, and a plus tag is stripped, so a person who uses tagged addresses is recognised as one person. Google accounts additionally ignore dots, so dots are removed for those and only those. That restriction matters more than it looks: for most providers a.b@ and ab@ are two different mailboxes, so applying the rule everywhere would have fixed duplicate records by silently merging two real people, which is a worse failure than the one being fixed.
A repeat only counts as a repeat if nothing new is being asked. The form asks what the enquiry is about, and those answers are now part of the decision. Ask about something never asked before and it creates a Lead, even from a familiar address. Ask about the same things again and it stays a note on the existing Lead, exactly as before. Asking nothing in particular is treated as its own kind of request rather than as a match for everything.
The comparison is bounded to six months. Someone returning after half a year is a new opportunity, not a duplicate of an old one.
Verified by submitting the real form, not by reading the change. Eleven submissions were put through the live form covering both outcomes, each confirmed by which record it actually produced. One of them exists purely as a control: it proves the six month filter really is excluding old records rather than quietly matching nothing, which would have looked identical from the outside and made every other test pass for the wrong reason. All test records were then deleted and their absence confirmed by re-reading the database.