Customer Email Change and Order Notifications

[kiatng]

My client received complaints from customers that when they changed the emails, they no longer receive order notifications. This is because the notification takes the email address from the order's customer_email which was set at order creation. I can think of 2 ways to solve it:

1. Modified the method getCustomerEmail() in order module to take the email from the customer module. Cost is a DB read operation.
2. On customer email change, add an observer to change the customer_email column in DB. Cost is event-observer and a DB write.

There are thousands of notifications sent everyday. Any idea which approach is best? Is this a good feature for OM?

[m-overlund]

Sound considerations and of course customers expect to get notifications on the new email.

As far as i know, as a logged in user, you cannot make a frontend order with a custom email address.
However, in admin, you can create a customer order, with a custom email address.

Maybe this should be considered too - what should happen here?

[kiatng]

If an order is created from backend and the user over write the email:

and if the customer change the email later, he or she would expect to receive the notification in the new email.

[fballiano]

I'd go with option 1, it is good to have a "snapshot" of all customer data at the time of the order for bureaucratic/administrative reasons and I'd prefer the historical data never to be changed :-)

[elidrissidev]

I'd go with this one too. In addition, if customer account doesn't exist (i.e. it was deleted) getCustomerEmail() should default to the email address saved in the order.