Hello,
This has just been brought to my attention today. A contact in our database, which was originally created back on 12 November 2017, is showing some strange behaviour and I cannot figure out what teh issue is.
Please see the screenshot below:
IMAGE REMOVED
So the original contact was Petra Fuchs, and it looks like a older user wanted to merge the records for two email addresses for p*****@johannesbad.de and p******@johannesbad.com on 11 February 2019.
After that, all activity for this record was attributed to p*****@johannesbad.com, until 4 May 2025 when d****@ferring.com became the value for the email address property, and when then followed by a couple more, as you can see in the screenshot.
Dods anyone have an idea of what is going on here?
Thank you!
Hi @EChamberlin8,
First off, I’d strongly recommend not sharing personal information of contacts in your CRM in a public forum. It’s unlikely that they provided their consent for their information to be shared that way. cc @CommunityTeam
To stop this behavior, in the options tab of the form editor (see source column), enable the “Always create contact for new email address” setting.
Without this setting enabled, HubSpot will assume that multiple submissions in the same browser session are coming from the same person and that the same contact should be thus overwritten. This can be useful but it’s often causing more problems than it helps, like in your case.
This will also happen when someone forwards a marketing email. In a marketing email, each link is personalized to the original recipient. Someone else clicking this link in a forwarded email and submitting a form can also cause the original contact’s record to be overwritten, as HubSpot assumes that it’s that original person updating their information.
Enable the toggle and it won’t happen anymore. You need to do it for every form.
To clean up, you’ll have to create a separate record and manually copy the information into that new record to unentangle them, unfortunately.
Best regards
OK, thank you for this, it makes a lot more sense now.
