Group several, related Hubspot comments together in Gmail

HubSpot Ideas
1

Summary

Hubspot is wasting a lot of my time trying to mentally group together related email content coming from multiple comments from multiple other people at my company on multiple topics. Hubspot lacks proper email headers that tell Gmail (and presumably other email clients) how to group related messages together in the inbox.

Please fix this issue! It is driving me nuts.

Problem 1

  1. Person1 adds a note to a Company XYZ or Deal XYZ and @ references me
  2. Person2 adds a comment on the note
  3. Person3 adds a comment to the same note
  4. … and so on
  5. I go to my Gmail inbox
  6. !ERROR - splattered around my inbox, I see multiple messages from “Hubspot” with subjects like
    1. Person 1 mentioned you on the company XYZ
    2. … other email messages
    3. Person 2 commented on an activity
    4. … other email messages
    5. Person 3 commented on an activity

EVEN WORSE, if the same sets of people are commenting on multiple other notes around the same time, the scenario continues and Gmail groups the emails BY AUTHOR by default and not BY TOPIC. This is the OPPOSITE of what any sane person would want.

Problem 2

  1. Person1 adds a note to a Company ABC or Deal ABC and @ references me
  2. Person2 adds a comment on the note
  3. Person3 adds a comment to the same note
  4. … and so on
  5. I go to my Gmail inbox
  6. !ERROR - now I see threads from Person 2 and Person 3 that are grouping entirely unrelated comments under the AUTHOR
    1. Hubspot (2) Person 1 mentioned you in a comment
      1. comment about XYZ
      2. comment about ABC
    2. … other email messages
    3. Hubspot (2) Person 2 mentioned you in a comment
      1. comment about XYZ
      2. comment about ABC

Expected Results

Hubspot should send email headers that group related messages by THREAD or by TOPIC, so that related email messages are grouped together by relevant topic. It is very hard to decipher multiple, active conversations from my Gmail inbox and I waste a lot of time going back and forth to piece it all together. I could argue for putting the topid identifier at a few different levels

  1. Note or Log entry
    1. My personal preference
    2. This would group together a “single level thread” of a Note in Hubspot, plus all subsequent comments on that Note in a distinct grouping in Gmail.
  2. Top level object: Company, Deal, Contact, etc.
    1. This would be better and help a lot, but is not as granular as I’d prefer.

Contrast current Hubspot behavior vs. Teamwork, or Github, or just about any other sytems that are sending multiple “threaded” comments via email. They all send email headers that tell Gmail to group related messages by TOPIC not by sender. For example, if multiple people comment on a particular Teamwork task, then all of the related messages are grouped together nicely in my Gmail inbox.

Looking at the source of the messages from Teamwork and Github, it appears to be the “In-Reply-To” and/or “References” headers in the email. They both have these headers and Hubspot DOES NOT.

A couple of examples that work well,

In-Reply-To: <thread.546152.11.22682289.task@replies.teamwork.com>
References: <thread.546152.11.22682289.task@replies.teamwork.com

In-Reply-To: <GithubOrg/repo/pull/1881@github.com>
References: <GithubOrg/repo/pull/1881@github.com>
2

Updating this to “Delivered” as we have released some recent improvements to notification emails for comments left in the CRM. This includes a re-design of the notification email subject line which will ensure notifications related to the same CRM record will be grouped together in email clients such as Gmail (provided the user has the Conversations View setting enabled in their Gmail). Please see the in-app notification here.

More details on how HubSpot’s comment notifications work can be found in this Knowledge Base article.

3

Thank you to the Hubspot team for finally fixing the email threading issues with Hubspot email notifications. The re-designed subject lines and inline display of other recent comments right in the email notification look great, and bring Hubspot email notifications up to modern standards. Recently, I literally felt less stress about going on vacation and unplugging from email for several days, knowing this new feature was in place. Much appreciated.