I've read several other posts saying that email is required, you won't be changing that, it's used as a key, etc. Fine, although I think that's strange and completely unnecessary, I assume you're probably in too deep to want to deal with it. It seems you may have some code that just sends email without validation from what I understand, so not having an email would create some issues. I'm tempted to test it out to see what happens. It looks like the _form_field table has a flags column that manages these requirement details. It looks like required is 489395, and optional is 13057.

The older posts I read mentioned disabling sending certain emails by default, and going into certain files to disable some sendmail code. Is this still true? Do you have any updated recommendations for attempting this? I know you recommend just putting a fake email, but that irks me and I would seriously rather rewrite code and adjust databases than have that for my team. Let me know what you think. Thanks