Handling dupes when A/B testing?

[Matt_Stone2]

I ran into a problem today for the first time using Marketo: the same person received the same email multiple times. The cause of this problem was twofold: the person had duplicate records in the system, and I was A/B testing different send times. According to Marketo, when A/B testing, each variant is considered its own bucket and only de-dupes within that bucket. So if John Doe has 6 records using the same email address, and they happen to fall into 6 different test variants of the same email, then John is getting that email all 6 times. What's strange is that I've done this kind of test many times previously where it should have affected people, and it hasn't.

I realize that the long-term answer is to eliminate these dupes to prevent this from happening, but I'm not sure how quick or practical that solution is. So I wanted to see if the community had any other ideas on how to manage this kind of a situation?

[Josh_Hill13]

Nope, clear the dupes first. No way to prevent this situation otherwise. This also occurs when you have people with multiple leads that qualify for different steps of the same campaign or could qualify separately for other campaigns.

[Jason_Scott]

We have the same issue and we can't remove the dupes.  There are instances where a contact would have two accounts, one personal and one business, and they both use the same email address.

Jason