Allow connection of Office 365 shared mailbox to Hubspot shared mailbox
My understanding is you can connect an Office 365 shared mailbox to a personal Hubspot account with IMAP settings, however, this option doesn't seem to bve available for the team shared mailbox connection in Hubspot.
This would be extremely useful as most business traffic comes through generic shared info@ or enquiries@ addresses and not being able to connect them to it's counterpart in Hubspot is a real loss.
It looks like we've got it working properly now. From my view there are two ways how to solve this issue.
In our situation we have shared inboxes not set up as users with a license. They are shared inboxes that the team (who each has their own license) can open in their outlook to read/send e-mails with.
Option 1:
To set up the shared inbox in HubSpot with their standard built-in functionality you will need to provide login credentials connected to that shared inbox. In other words you need it to be a licensed user. How to use the built-in functionality is easy and explained here.
Option 2:
Use the forwarding workaround that TRaymondRoto mentions in the previous post. I did not test this option but HS support mentioned the following about this method: The solution that they are explaining in the post is to use your HubSpot fallback e-mail address. The fallback address would be the forwarding address that you set externally. But the limitation here would be that every email would have to forwarded, and to set up the distribution group, I would recommend working with your IT team.
We solved it by providing the shared inbox with an Exchange Online licence/user account and used Option 1 to connect it to HubSpot. And disabled the standard MFA policy on that user account. In our case this would cost us less than € 50,-/year I did not test Option 2, but it seems that this would work as well.
When not using Office365 shared accounts, it undermines authorization management in my company. This means that I always have to change the Office365 password for the account when employees change. Due we use multiple tools with Office365 shared accounts, the best way would be to use an App password.
I understand that it is possible to connect an Office 365 shared mailbox to a personal Hubspot account with IMAP settings. This is great, but something important has been forgotten here: the integration of shared mailboxes for teams is essential.
Most business traffic in companies comes through shared generic addresses like info@ or enquiries@. Not being able to connect these mailboxes to their counterpart in Hubspot makes no sense. Only someone who does not know or understand what Office 365 is could think we do not need this integration.
Support and sales teams usually use a single entry email to manage communications. Therefore, the most appropriate logic is simple: Allow the connection of an Office 365 shared mailbox to a Hubspot shared mailbox. This is not just useful, it is essential for team operations efficiency.
I hope this issue is resolved soon, as the proper integration of these mailboxes is crucial for the effective functioning of the teams.
Thank you in advance for your attention and help with this.
Just adding a mee-to bump to this thread. Not being able to connect a shared inbox is causing our organization considerable headaches. But in our case the issue centers around a lack of reporting. We have a lot of automated marketing emails that go out to our customers as part of the sales cycle from our shared mail box. The shared mailbox is a user in Hubspot so it can be set as the mail sender, and replies go where they should into the mailbox, but because the shared mailbox is not connected, we can't track the effectiveness/reply rate of every email. Since this mailbox is basically an 'info@company.com' style mailbox, every single one of our customers start their relationship with us via that account, and we can't track how effective our communications are.
For those who've had success with workarounds, are you also able to track marketing email statistics with these sends? @rtjeenkwillink , @OdeGraaf9 are you sending automated emails from your shared inbox with your workarounds, and is Hubspot tracking the metrics?
Adding a me-too upvote for this idea as it is causing our organization considerable difficulty using the tool without it. We've got a shared mailbox address in the vein of 'info@company.com' that is the initial contact point for most of our customers. It's set up as a user in Hubspot so we can send automated emails from it, but not being able to use this shared mailbox as a connected inbox means the outgoing emails and customer responses aren't getting tracked/logged in hubspot, and as a result the analytics on the email's page in Hubspot always shows 0% rates for replies, opens, etc. It makes it impossible for sales and marketing to gauage the effectiveness of their first touches, which is a majort gap considering this is how the majority of our leads get in touch with us. We have a complicated set of workflows to send out communications under this account after initial contact but can't report on the effectiveness of any of them.
Can anyone who's connected using a workaround speak to Hubspot capturing the opens/replies in the Marketing Emails screens? @OdeGraaf9 , any luck with that?
Our workaround was to temporarily convert it to a personal email with a licence, connect it to HubSpot using the password, then convert it back to a shared mailbox. This can be a bit of work and if it gets disconnected for any reason you need to do it all again, but it does work.
