We regularly have contacts who reach out to our support team via email from different addresses. They might contact us from their work email, personal email, and an alias email (bsmith@email.com vs bobsmith@email.com). In all of these cases, we want to link the email lead to the actual user by merging the contact and adding one of the newly identified email addresses as a secondary email address for that contact.
Front, Zendesk, and Help Scout all offer this as basic functionality.
Without this ability to maintain multiple email addresses for a single contact, we have multiple threads going in various locations without our awareness. Likewise, it’s a challenge to keep our customer in-app data in view when the other email addresses are treated as leads rather than linkable to the primary user contact.