HubSpot Email Integration: Stop Tracking Out of Office Replies

[nfoisy]

Hello, currently wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue and might know of a work around. My sales team uses the HubSpot integration in Outlook to track emails they send to contacts and log them in HubSpot. The integration will also create new contacts for email addresses we don't have contacts for. Both features are very helpful. New contacts aren't created unless a sales rep sends an email to the individual.

Here's where we have an issue. A sales rep will go on vacation and set up automatic out of office replies in Outlook. The rep will get a random marketing email from a company, let's say "McDonalds". Outlook sends the automatic out of office reply from the sales rep to McDonalds, and then HubSpot goes and creates a new contact for "donotreply@mcdonalds.com". Definitely a contact that will never serve us any good and will ultimately cost us more money as our contact numbers continue to rise. I can delete these contacts but new ones keep coming in from new companies while sales reps are away. The only thing that could be done is to make all my sales reps disable email tracking before vacation and re-enable it when they return, though I know folks will forget and issues will arise. I'd love to find some sort of automated solution, such as a setting in the HubSpot integration that doesn't track any emails containing a particular phrase, such as "out of office". Unfortunately this feature doesn't exist, and I was wondering if anyone had encountered this problem as well and found a solution. Thanks!

[louischausse · Accepted solution]

Hello here,

I don't understand why these email are logged in the first place...

We use Gsuite and the auto replies aren't logged and they don't create new contacts. I think it should be the same for Outlook. My guess is maybe your outlook integration isn't properly setup.

Have you set the bcc address by default in all outbound emails? Maybe that is the problem. If the answer is yes, removing this will fix the problem. And you could use the log email checkbox instead.

If this is not the case, the solution provided by @TitiCuisset will also work

[TitiCuisset]

Hi @nfoisy 

Thank you for posting in the Community. 

So my understanding is you would like to track the out of office replies from your colleagues in order to delete the random contacts it creates. 

We do not have a specific tool to do this, but if you have a Marketing Pro subscription you could create a list based on the Activity Properties filters - using the Email Body or Email subject filter, to filter all the contacts who have an email logged with this content. 

That would allow you to know which contacts have received the automatic out of office reply and to more easily find the newly created contacts that need to be deleted.

You can find some information on how to create a list here: 
Determine your list criteria 

I also want to tag some of our experts in this matter - @louischausse @Ben_M do you have any thoughts regarding this? Thank you! 

Hope that helped

Have a lovely day

Tiphaine