As of v5.9.2 all Blesta contacts and clients MUST have a valid email address recorded. And those email addresses must also pass Blesta MX record testing in email validation in order to be saved.

Currently we have a client that wants to use Blesta to manage an ancestry site. Some of the family members are minor children. The client wants to save all family members as contacts of the parent client (for reporting and other purposes). These minor children do not have email addresses so we define the email address for them as %childname%@email.bad. This client currently does this in WHMCS. In WHMCS, they have preEmail() hookpoints (events) that are able to stop any outgoing emails when the recipient's email address contains @email.bad. This is a very simple way to handle this in WHMCS but it does NOT work in Blesta.

While it remains possible to modify Blesta's core code to disable MX record checking, and it remains possible to edit a Linux server's /etc/hosts file to add this bogus email.bad domain name, and it remains possible to even create the dummy email.bad domain in a DNS server, none of these are as simple as just not requiring the email address for a contact that is NEVER expected to be contacted in the first place.

Since it is not possible to disable this MX record check in Blesta via UI preference settings, it would be nice if the email address field were optional for custom contact types. Leave the primary and billing contact as email required, but all other contact types, email optional. This way it can still be defined if needed, but it can be left blank for those where a contact is NOT expected to ever receive email.