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Why do I have duplicate users?
Why do I have duplicate users?
Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago


This answer comes from the Intercom Community forum. 👌


I have duplicates of some users, all with the same email address. How did this happen? How can I fix it?

If you have multiple customers in your Intercom workspace with the same email address, it may be because you’re passing a different user_ID for each one.

When you define both an email address and user_ID for a user, Intercom uses the user_ID as a unique identifier.

For example, if you have two users, both with the email address test@example.com, but they have different user_IDs, Intercom will recognise these customers as two unique users.

Do you use user IDs in your own product? You can check from your Contacts page:

It's currently not possible to merge two Users in Intercom. You can merge a lead into a user, but you cannot merge two users.

How to identify duplicates

You could clean up the users you don't want to keep by archiving them. You'd first have to figure out which of the two records you want to keep, though. There are two ways you could do this:

1. Using our Rest API

You'd want to create a script which would:

  • List Users

  • Find the duplicates

  • For the duplicate that you want to remove, make a request to archive it

2. Using our CSV Export

The other option is to use our CSV export. You would then have to use some kind of script or formula to identify duplicate values. You could also try to get the exported users into Google Spreadsheets and use a formula or an add-on to to do it.

Once you have the list of people you want to archive, you can use a CSV import to tag those, and then archive them from the UI based on the tag.

Read the whole thread and find out how to clean up duplicates, here in Intercom Community.


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