CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've noticed some strange discrepancies when importing contacts and importing/updating contacts.

I have external IDs for all my contacts so I have a dupe check on external ID only for importing.  I had a set of contacts some of which were in the db and some were not.  I selected "update" for duplicates and worked with the set until all errors were accounted for.  I then selected to add the contacts to an existing group that had no members yet and the process went like this:

2218 contacts uploaded successfully
2170 added to group (48 not added because already in the group)

I checked via exporting the group (and exporting all contacts), matching with my external IDs found that the 48 were indeed not in the group, but also they had not been uploaded at all.  So that's the silent fail.

The reason I think they were not uploaded is that their email matched an already existing contact, which brings me to what I think is a bug.  I specifically chose a strict external IDs match duplicate check which to me means treat matching external IDs as duplicates, add all other contacts.

Checking a subset of those that DID get "uploaded successfully" I found that where the email address matched another contact, that contacts record was updated with even the external identifier being overwritten.  This seems like the wrong approach given my dupe check.

Am I wrong?  Is the import dupe check just the initial pass and a second check based on email occurs silently after in all cases?