Welcome to the Community @HelgaH! I’ll +1 to what @karstenkoehler has offered (always - that guy is a gem). I’ll also add some thoughts here.
HubSpot doesn’t automatically add a contact in your CRM simply because someone sends an unsolicited email to one of your users. Or at least, it’s not supposed to. However, HubSpot has a relatively new beta feature related to incoming emails and contact creation. This feature, available in some HubSpot subscriptions, allows the system to automatically populate contact properties from emails received in connected personal email inboxes by scanning email signatures and bodies for contact info. But the botoom line is that it does not create new contacts solely from incoming emails if those contacts don’t already exist.
Instead, contact creation in HubSpot via Microsoft email integration typically happens when your users send out emails to new recipients, or when emails are logged through HubSpot’s connected inbox and sales tools, especially with the Outlook or Office 365 plugins actively used for tracking and logging.
Here’s what that’s supposed to look like (Expected Behavior you might say):
- HubSpot creates new contacts when a user sends or logs an email to a new email address. This includes outgoing emails from your users.
- Incoming unsolicited emails to your users’ Microsoft inbox alone do not automatically create contacts in HubSpot unless the email is logged manually or via an enabled sales extension.
- If HubSpot’s Connected Inbox or sales extension is actively logging all emails (including replies), it may create contacts for new email addresses found in those tracked emails, but just receiving an unsolicited email without an associated logged email from your user does not create a contact.
- I have seen some feedback reported in the Community that if the email address is seen in tracked email threads, HubSpot may automatically create a contact record, but this usually still connects to logged outbound or replied emails from your team.
So my guess here is that the spam contacts you are seeing likely result from HubSpot logging emails sent or replied to by your users, or from other tools or automations connected to HubSpot. HubSpot won’t create CRM contacts solely from receiving unsolicited inbound emails without user action to log or send emails.
A few ideas to help with this could be:
- Limit automatic logging of inbound emails unless necessary.
- Use workflows to flag and clean spam contacts created.
- Adjust Connected Inbox and sales extension logging settings for who and what gets logged.
To go a little deeper, recent updates to the platform mean HubSpot can automatically block or flag spammy form submissions with new AI-powered spam detection that can block contact creation at the form-level when enabled. This doesn’t apply to emails coming in through Microsoft integration directly, but it may help if you find that spammy contacts are coming through form submissions. By the way, I’d definitely investigate that to see if that’s the more likely case.
HubSpot’s Conversations Inbox allow & deny list can help mark certain emails or domains as spam to avoid adding them to CRM automatically. Unfortunately, HubSpot does not have a built-in way to filter incoming contacts created directly from connected personal inbox emails (such as Outlook in Microsoft’s email integration).
I also found these short lists that may be helpful:
Here’s a recommended HubSpot workflow and automation approach you could test out.
- Create a custom property to flag spam contacts.
- Build workflows that identify suspicious contacts (e.g., containing spammy keywords in email or company name, no engagement, etc.).
- Automatically unmark such contacts as marketing contacts or delete after a grace period.
- Use HubSpot’s allow & deny lists in Conversations Inbox to reduce spam in conversations from connected team emails.
- Regularly monitor contacts flagged as spam for review.
Hopefully that helps some as well.
