Disable Smart Matching EmailHashBase table population for Dataverse environments

For anyone that has been using Server-Side Synchronization and automatic email correlation, you may be familiar with the term Smart Matching. I won't go into detail on what Smart Matching is, but you can take a look at this document HERE. Smart Matching is a legacy email correlation method from as far back as CRM 4.0. Now, there are newer methods of Email Correlation that use an Exchange item's ConversationIndex to correlate that email to an existing thread. This does not require Smart Matching or Tracking Tokens. I cover this setting in more detail HERE.

You can disable Smart Matching, but even though you have Smart Matching disabled, by default, we still populate the EmailHashBase database table in the event anyone was not using Smart Matching and decided to in the future. This would allow Smart Matching email correlation to work on historical items. However, for those that never intend to use Smart Matching, this will continue populating this table, impacting storage consumption. Additionally, with the newer Email Correlation option, Smart Matching is not necessary for proper correlation.

What is this setting?

We created a new OrgDbOrgSetting, DisableSmartMatchingEmailHashCreation. Changing this setting to true, will stop population of the EmailHashBase table. However, it will not remove the data from this table. You will need to contact your dedicated Customer Engineer or Microsoft support to complete that process.

Important Note:

If you set DisableSmartMatchingEmailHashCreation to True or if the EmailHashBase table is cleaned out/truncated and you were to choose to enable Smart Matching in the future (not recommended), email correlation would only work on emails from that day forward. 

Verify you are not using Smart Matching

First, you will want to go to System Settings, in the Email tab, to double-check you are not configured for Smart Matching and that you have only Use correlation to track email conversations checked. Also make sure you check with any relevant team members to ensure there is no plans to enable Smart Matching. If not, you are good to proceed. 

Change the setting

Once you have confirmed this, you can disable the Smart Matching feature and table population. Go to Settings| Solutions and open the OrganizationSettingsEditor solution. It will likely prompt you that you are not on the latest version and to download version 1.0.2103.1201. Please download and import this solution. If you do not yet have this solution installed, you can install it from here

Once imported and upgraded, open the solution and find the following two settings.

Click Add for each of these and choose Yes

Then click Edit for each of these and change to true and click Update

If you have questions, please feel free to comment.

Thank you for reading!

Aaron Richards