CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have an installation of CiviCRM 2.2 running on Drupal 6.6, with around 2000 individuals in the contact database as part of a small alumni association. I migrated my client's database from an Excel spreadsheet that was being used, and it has mostly gone really well: the client is happy.

As part of giving access to members to their online records, we have to create a Drupal account. This is typically not a problem, and I have been using the awesome drupal module Node Import (http://drupal.org/project/node_import) in release candidate 4 flavor to import CiviCRM individuals as users into Drupal. This works great -- except for the fact that I can't import people unless they have an email address.

There are about half of the members in the database that do no have email addresses, although they probably do it's just that we don't have them. What can I do? We have tried contacting these members to get updated information: not very successful. We've thought about creating dummy email addresses: this will just server to confuse the members.

Is there a way to create a drupal account without a valid email address (maybe something like user@domain) and still have it be associated with the correct CiviCRM individual? I would love to be able to create an account for every single member in the database with an username and password I generate, and have them log in to add an email address if we don't happen to have it. We will be sending out printed material to the members, and we plan on including the username/password on that material so that they can log in and update their info.

What is the connection between Drupal accounts and CiviCRM accounts? Is it indeed email address? Or, is there another relationship that could be used?

Thanks for the note: I think that creating the dummy email addresses would work, as long as the connection between the drupal account and the civicrm account is not lost when I reset the email address to null.

And yes, snail mail is how the alumni will receive their unique username and password -- we have physical addresses. We could also potentially call them.