I'm running Sugar 5.1b with MSSQL 2005.

I've sent out plenty of campaigns over the last year and am quite happy with the performance. I have noticed however, that if I create two records (since an email campain will only send to the primary email address), with the same first name and last name but each with a different email address, if I have a field in my template ($contact_first_name) for instance, that field is left 'blank' when the email goes out. If i delete one of the records, the field is populated accordingly.

The record I had created in the Contacts module was like this
First_name Last_name Email
John Doe jdoe@gmail.com
John Doe jdoe@hotmail.com

What i did in this case is chose the records in the Contacts module of jdoe@gmail.com and composed an email from that record's detailview. In the email module, the contact's email address populate accordingly in the To: address line. I choose my email template that had $contact_first_name in the template. When the email was received at the gmail.com address, the $contact_first_name was blank instead of containing the first name.
However, when I deleted the contact that was attached to jdoe@hotmail.com and went back to the record attached to jdoe@gmail.com and sent out the email using the same template, the $contact_first_name would be populated.

Is there a logical explanation for this? There could be instances where I could have another contact where the first name and last name is actually the same of an existing contact, but can be a problem sending an email with fields that are not populated