We have a subset of contacts that are flagged as "inactive" for various reasons. When our CS teams, who use email-to-case, email out of SF, is there a way to filter out these contacts when they are adding "to" addresses in their email?
#Service Cloud
That's exactly the right read — and the ERP sync detail makes blanking the email more attractive, not less, because you're sidestepping deletion entirely. You keep every inactive contact in place so you stay in sync, you just remove the one thing the email picker matches on.
One thing to square with your integration before you flip it: make sure the ERP sync won't simply re-write the email back on the next run. If the integration treats email as a managed field it owns, it'll happily repopulate what you blanked and your fix quietly undoes itself. Two ways around that — either move the address to your custom "Former Email" field and have the integration stop syncing the standard Email field for inactive records, or gate the blanking with the integration so it respects your "inactive" flag. Whichever is less disruptive to your sync mapping.
And since you called it yourself — yes, this is the holding pattern, not the cure. When you do get to the cleanup, the duplicate-creation problem is the one I'd attack first, because a duplicate rule on Contact tends to stop the bleeding faster than anything else, and it makes the eventual merge far smaller.
If it'd help, I'm happy to sketch what the "inactive contact" handling could look like end-to-end once the cleanup is on the table — flag, picker behavior, and how the ERP sync should treat those records — so the temporary fix and the permanent one don't fight each other.
