Hi,
We've got an Automation rule which saves the email address of a customer to a custom field upon using our online form. This part works fine.
The part which is giving an error is when we want to use this email address to create a new customer. The point of this step is to be able to send the customer an email when our agent has responded to their request. This Automation has been running smoothly for over a year, but now we get an error every time it runs. I'm unable to detect what's creating this error. Please help.
The relevant steps of our Automation:

Basically it goes
- save certain part of e-mail text as customer name in custom field 10042
- save certain part of e-mail text as customer email address is custom field 10046
- change channel to 'web form'
- refresh issue data
- create new customer using both custom fields mentioned above
Step 5 is where the error occurs. Below the details of this step.

As said these settings have been working for over a year, up until a few days ago.
The log says this:

Which translates to: "Error while creating new customer: The request is invalid. Check if your request contains all the necessary parameters and if these are valid. (email: you have to use a valid email address)"
I have checked the contents of the field and it just contains the email address as intented, nothing less, nothing more.
Thank you for your help.