Allow indicating when several email addresses are the same person
Many people use two or three email addresses: one for business and the other one for social stuff. If I know both of them, why can't I get the same info on both of them?
Mario .
shared this idea
We’ve made some progress on this: once you’ve connected your Google Contacts to Rapportive (http://blog.rapportive.com/address-book-inbox-together-at-last), then if you have several email addresses for a contact, we’ll recognise that the different email addresses are the same person, and show the same profile for all of them. This means you can “link” two profiles together by creating a contact in Google Contacts with both of the email addresses – however please note we could take up to a day to notice the change.
If we determine from your Google Contacts that two email addresses are the same person, that will be private to you – i.e. you’ll see the same information for that person from then on, but other people will still see them as separate. That’s because people often want to keep their personal and professional identities separate in public.
We know there are times when you want to link addresses together without mucking around with Google Contacts (especially if you don’t use Google Contacts for anything else!), and we’re still working on a way to support that.
We are also already working on a way for you to say “this email address belongs to me, associate it with my Rapportive profile” (obviously we’ll have to verify it really does belong to you!). That way people will be able to link together all the email addresses they use, if they choose to do so. (I use several email addresses myself, so I appreciate the need for this!)
Will update this when we know when these features are likely to roll out.
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Gus Elliott
commented
Sam,
Thank you for your prompt reply. To be honest, I am not very happy with the Google address book. They have never made it grow up and act like a real contact database, so as we sync with other devices (address books, phones, etc.) data is easily damaged. Not separating first and last name, for example, and not giving any room for titles can make things go crazy.
I say this because I DO make a concerted effort to keep all of my contacts up-to-date in my address book and then I sync it to Google. My Google contacts will typically have all phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and notes that I have. Of course it lacks some of the more detailed information other address books can store.
Your response suggests that you would need to ask, "Is this the same John Doe?" But I don't believe you would because I keep all 1 to x email addresses in the same contact record. So if there is a unique identifier for the contact record you have, you are in good shape for a cross-reference.
As a further thought on this, I have seen a lot of companies have trouble keeping in sync with Google's contact DB because of its poor design. I have not dug into what is available in the API, but it may be that email address (and definitely not email type) is one of the only things you can rely on in the record since names and other info can get so mangled through synchronization. If anyone has to do an overwrite sync to Google, you might lose any other identifiers and have to rescan.
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AdminSam Stokes
(Admin, Rapportive)
commented
Gus and Ted, thanks so much for taking the time to spell out in detail how you'd like this to work. Most of your contacts probably don't use Rapportive (yet? :)), so I can see that the solution I outlined before wouldn't help much with this problem.
I've updated the status with an idea of how this might work - is that the sort of thing you were expecting?
This would obviously depend on your Google Address Book being well-stocked with contacts. Google automatically adds people you email to your address book, so that would help with this problem. Could I ask whether you also spend much time manually adding people to your address book, filling in their details, etc?
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Gus Elliott
commented
I share Ted's interpretation of the need. No offense, Sam, but I don't really want another "profile" I have to maintain with Rapportive. Its greatest value to me is that it should take what I already know about all the people in my address book and inbox and help me pull together an understanding of my interactions with those people. I make sure my address book contains all the email addresses from which someone (e.g., Joe Smith) might email me. If I open an email from Joe Smith, I would expect Rapportive to look up all the email addresses I have for Joe Smith in order to tell me about him.
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Ted Pavlic
commented
Sam - I don't think that's exactly in the spirit of this feature request. This feature request is about the case where I, the rapportive user, have someone who e-mails me from multiple e-mail addresses. Sometimes that person e-mails me from work and sometimes they e-mail me from home. Regardless of what address they e-mail me from, I want rapportive to show me any information associated with EITHER address. So I want to tell rapportive that just for me, I want to group address A with address B.
This feature request does not require that the person e-mailing me is also a rapportive user. This feature request is not suggesting that rapportive automatically group addresses together (because how would it know?). This feature request would allow me to tell rapportive that whenever I'm looking at an e-mail from address A, rapportive should act like I'm also getting the e-mail from address B.
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Britt Crawford
commented
It would also be useful to be able to group other users' email addresses together. For example, I might know that john.appleseed@gmail.com and johnnya@hotmail.com are the same person. So it might be nice for me to be bale to associate the two together so that I get the same profile view for either address.
I don't think you'd want to propagate this info out to other rapportive users but it would be nice to have this sort of aliasing within your account.
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Peter Hodge
commented
Some way to associate email addresses together would be good. A solution to the example above would increase the amount I use Rapportive significantly.