Betreff: Contacts - Emails associating to the wrong contact

[TPhillip]

I have been a happy hubspot user over the past two years and was considering moving to the start hub however my experiences over the past two weeks have been extremely frustrating.

Please see the explanation below, noting that we use the Free CRM and have under 15,000 contacts:

Irregularities were noticed on 8/10/2021, wherein most new accounts are automatically associating themselves with accounts who have recently been sent an email via Outlook (using the Outlook Add-on) from different connected users.

Initially, some of the affected accounts were attended to by my staff and it was just a matter of un-associating the contacts in the ‘hijacked’ account (leaving the account holder associated) and the relevant emails/information would revert to its original location. For example, Contact "John Doe" has emails for "Jane Doe" and "Johanna Doe" in his contact profile and the emails were associated with John Doe, John Doe, and Johanna Doe and once we un-associated the erroneous emails, the email would remain under the correct contact.

As of yesterday,14 Oct 2021, it seems that the issue has gotten worse, whereby, when un-associated, the emails/ information is now unaccounted for as it is not appearing in the original account and is not showing up when filtered for recent activity. For example, Contact "John Doe" has emails for "Jane Doe" and "Johanna Doe" in his contact profile and the emails are only associated with John Doe even though the email address it was sent to was for Jane or Johanna.

We have not encountered a problem of this sort before and we have been using Hubspot since Sept 2019. Would this be in relation to Hubspot moving its servers which happened during the weekend of 9th to 10th October 2021?

Please advise on what solutions can be found and if this is an issue that will be rectified by Hubspot

[ESondergeld]

I have the same problem. One of my contacts has the emails I've sent to several other people at different companies. This contact is only associated with one company and wouldn't have been associated with the other companies or contacts. Can someone from Hubspot contact me to help fix this?

[MLong82]

I have the same issue. Could you help me to solve it?

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @MLong82, I apologize for the late reply! I've noticed that you've also posted about this in the Spanish Community, I wanted to share the thread here for visibility. 

Cheers
Mia, Community Team 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @TPhillip,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! 

If I understand correctly, there are certain emails in your HubSpot account that were automatically associated with a contact, but were, in fact, addressed to different contacts?

There might be a couple of reasons for this behavior and it would be great if you can tell us more about how those contacts were created and how the emails were sent. 

For context - here are 2 specific circumstances where we've seen errors in email association in the past:

• A contact record might have been associated with multiple different email addresses in the past. For example, contact's email has been overwritten because the same form (with different email addresses) was submitted multiple times on the same device&browser. If this is the case, you'll see multiple email addresses if you check the email property history (Details). As a consequence, email activities with multiple different email addresses might end up on that record.  
• We've also seen this happen for Outlook users if they send many iterations of the same email to different recipients, using either “reply-all,” or “forward” after each send to add a new recipient address. Sending in this manner causes many of the emails sent this way to be incorrectly tagged with the same threadID and therefore logged on the wrong contact record. We recommend to always use a new compose window in Outlook each time you send an email.

You mentioned that you have manually adjusted the associations for those erroneous emails - have you done that via the associations tab on the email activity in the CRM? 

The expected behaviour would be that the emails get logged on all contact records that you've selected via the Associations tab. If that wasn't the case, it would be great if you could send me examples of contact records from your HubSpot account in a direct message via my Community profile so our team can investigate this further. 

Thank you!

Mia,

Community Team 

[PMenzies]

I have just noticed exactly the same issue as Tphillip and despite changing the association, the mails are not moved to the correct contact

[TPhillip]

Mia,

I messaged you directly.

Thank you.

[TPhillip]

Hi Mia,

We do generally send out emails from Outlook as described in the 2nd Circumstance and we have never had this issue occur before. Instead we would see the thread of emails which we were fine with.

Regarding your suggestion to send emails on a new email message, one of my staff did that and it still associated with other people. Could it be because the email subject was the same? We have approved email subjects to send out so changing email subjects for each email will be a problem.

I will directly message you with specific contacts for your help.

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @TPhillip,

HubSpot might have detected the presence of a In-Reply-To or References header in the email that your colleague created. If that was the case, HubSpot could have automatically assigned that email to the original thread instead of the contact record where you would expect it to log. Has your colleague copy-pasted the email subject and body from an existing email?  

This would be a great expample for our expert team to look at - could you send me the additional information I requested via DM? Thank you!

Mia, Community Team 

[alexagatiss]

Hi @MiaSrebrnjak , I am having the same problem right now. A person on my team copy and pasted an email and sent it to two completely different contacts (different names, different emails, different companies). The emails are now showing up only on one contact's profile. How do we fix this?