I already spent hours of reading through Hubspot community entries and help pages but I am still confused. Maybe someone can help us.
Our Problem: Since Feb 2024, our email address is transformed by Hubspot from info@domain.de to info=domain.de@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com. Most of these emails get lost in the spam folders of our customers/vendors.
My question: Is there any way, we can use Hubspot for sending out emails without this transformation? We need our emails to be sent out via our proofen email address info@domain.de. Is this possible in a Free Plan or do we need another fee-paying Hubspot Plan??
More Details:
We are using Hubspot Free Plan as CRM system for our nonprofit charity association (email communication to customers/vendors and newsletter mailings). We have an own homepage hosted at Ionos / 1und1.
Our trials so far: I already checked and executed the steps described on Manage your email authentication in HubSpot.
So I did the following:
We created a new subdomain Subdomain.domain.de via Hubspot. I had to verify Ionos and the DNS entries were created in our Ionos Account automatically.
After that I created a new email address: info@subdomain.domain.de and connected it within Hubspot. This was done via Hubspot Settings - General - E-Mail - Link personal E-Mail AND via Hubspot Settings - Tools - Inbox - Inboxes.
I was not able to receive the verification mail by Hubspot because the MX entries were not created properly, so I added them manually in Ionos: MX mail mx01.ionos.de and mx01.ionos.de.
After that, we were able to verifiy the new subdomain email address.
In Ionos this deleted the DNS entry CNAME mail <Hubspot-ID>group0.sites.hscoscdn-eu1.net which was originally created automatically by Hubspot.
The result is: We are able to receive and send out emails from our new email address info@subdomain.domain.de but Hubspot still transforms this email address when sending out an email into info=subdomain.domain.de@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com
This is not acceptable. We were so happy with Hubspot especially for us as a nonprofit charity association. But now, with this limitation we cannot use Hubspot anymore. So we switched back to our normal inbox provided by Ionos to communicate to our customers.
Is this really the conclusion of this?!
It would be great if somebody could help us understand the issue and explain our possibilities.
Hi @philippmn - I understand this is frustrating, but the only solution is to authenticate the email-sending domains as described in this article. For unauthenticated emails, HubSpot is going to use their default HubSpot domains.
Dear @karstenkoehler, it was not my intention to "shoot at the messenger". Sorry for that.
This goes directly to Hubspot:
I am very frustrated about the Hubspot policy. I understand borders of Free Plans! This is totally ok. But taking away a central key feature from existing Free Plan Customers is a very clear message: We do not care about customers and we want to earn as much money as possible.
For thousands of small companies, nonprofit accsociations or NGOs, this means a **bleep** of work. Finding an alternative CRM, migrating everything and start from scratch. Moreover, we will definitively loose data quality. When I think about the hours of maintaining data in Hubspot....
I would be very suprised if Hubspot answers on that post. Lets see.
Thank you for sharing this feedback. I hear and feel the frustration you are sending.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience regarding this.
I would like to apologize for the frustration, data issues, and business impact this has caused.
What you are seeing is a new domain that we created to implement a ‘variable domain’ process to ensure that Free accounts can continue sending ; even though, connecting a sending domain is possible with a Starter+ subscription.
You would need a paid subscription to connect an email sending domain (and thus send without this transformation).
The reason this transformation is happening is because ‘Free’ customers cannot connect an email sending domain, and thus, do not have proper authentication in place to ensure their emails are properly delivered.
Due to this, we update the domain for Free customers to send from a HubSpot owned domain that is properly authenticated (ensuring Free customers' mail is not immediately rejected).
It’s important to note that Free customers have never been able to connect an email sending domain. We (HubSpot) did not ‘take away’ a feature from Free customers in February 2024.
What changed was the Google/Yahoo domain requirements.All subsequent changes were to protect our customers and ensure they could continue sending.
So, in terms of the behavior you are seeing here, it is working as designed.
However, I'd like to thank you for your valuable feedback, I have shared it internally with the Team.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can help with. I'll be delighted to do so!
... then proceed to complete the steps from this article. This is the only way to have email sent from your sending domain, without any HubSpot branding.
Best regards!
Karsten Köhler HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer