Updating Email statuses automatically when an email gets updated in Marketo

[Eric_Podewell1]

Instead of having to set-up a workflow to look for email updates and then have the workflow change data values in the email invalid field, hard bounce, hard bounce details, etc., like I have set up below, Marketo should automatically recognize when an email gets changed and clear out the related fields automatically. Further, Marketo currently is unable to distinguish between an email address in all lower case or mixed case when everything else in the email address is the same, resulting in Marketo thinking an update has been made and triggering the workflow, so Marketo also needs to make sure that its email logic is case insensitive to prevent invalid email flags, etc. from being removed when the email address in fact has not changed.

Interested in hearing others thoughts on this subject and how they might deal with updating the email status fields or how they might prevent the case sensitive issue from occurring in a similar workflow as below.

[Cameron_Maher]

I don't know how to deal with this but it's causing problems for us too. I'm just deactivating the flow for now and will have to look at the leads manually to see which ones are actually valid changes. I'm confused about why Marketo treats email addresses as case sensitive, when most Smart List filters are not.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'm confused about why Marketo treats email addresses as case sensitive, when most Smart List filters are not.

Marketo triggers Data Value Changes in a case-sensitive manner.

Marketo data storage is case-preserving.

And most data queries on the server side (though not, for example, JS-driven form logic on the client side) are case-insensitive.

This kind of of behavior is very common. In fact, it's the way standard SQL databases work. Changing a stored value from 'sandy' to 'SANDY' will fire an update trigger in the db, but the queries

     select * from mytable where lastname = 'sandy'

     select * from mytable where lastname = 'SANDY'

will both find the record both before and after the change, unless the query/database has been deliberately set to a case-sensitive collation (the exception, not the rule).

Anyway, since Marketo uses this standard behavior for all string fields, it seems you're looking for an exception for email addresses in particular.  It's true that while email addresses are technically case-sensitive they're commonly treated as neither case-preserving nor case-sensitive. I agree a new "case insensitive" constraint on triggers (any triggers) would be very nice-to-have.  Case insensitive couldn't become the default behavior, though, because some logic depends on any actual db update being detected.

For now, the workaround (if for some reason you can't canonicalize your email addresses to lowercase before updating them) can be to pass the new and old email address to a webhook, which can perform a case-insensitive comparison. Then you trigger on what the webhook tells you.