In 2011, when I was starting off with Sugar, I drew a sketch of the back-end tables that make up an Email.
Fast Forward (and it has been very fast) to 2026 and I asked ClaudeAI to take that overused coffee-stained sketch and draw it out for me.
I thought I would share it here, together with some thoughts on a cleanup effort I've been working through hoping others will share their cleanup journey too.
We are on-site, and space has never been much of an issue, but that's not a good reason to let the data sit unchecked and I found some "orphans" around the Emails module.
What I found:
1) I have quite a few orphan email addresses with no related Emails or beans
I believe these come from Spam emails that reached our Inbound email addresses.
The Case is deleted, the corresponding Email is deleted, but the email address remains, with no related beans or Emails.
2) I have quite a few orphan Emails where the customer's email address/es are not linked to any Beans
These are most likely from a custom inbound_email address that does not create Cases but is parsed to create Leads.
The Lead is deleted as Spam/useless but the email address and corresponding Email remain.
Clearly such orphaned emails are not ever visible on any record unless you go directly to the Emails module (and who does that?)
3) I have a lot of email addresses that were marked invalid over time and should probably be deleted, but if I do that then I should delete the Email too, or I'll end up with Emails with no To/From address.
Have you tried doing some cleanup in this area of your stored data?
What have you found? And how are you going about cleaning things up?
Thanks,
FrancescaS