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.
I will at least move this from 'Idea Submitted' to 'Being Reviewed' because all of your helpful feedback and and upvotes are not going into a blackhole! Turns out I've been subscribed to this post for awhile, and we are wondering if this is something we can tackle next year.
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.
Looking at HubSpot Service Hub vs Front for managing inbound digital customer service channels at the moment. My customer has 40+ shared mailboxes. The cost of converting all to licensed M365 mailboxes is a bit unexpected if we go down that path. Front support shared mailboxes natively (https://help.front.com/en/articles/2068). Surprised in 5 years, there has been no movement on this idea.
I will at least move this from 'Idea Submitted' to 'Being Reviewed' because all of your helpful feedback and and upvotes are not going into a blackhole! Turns out I've been subscribed to this post for awhile, and we are wondering if this is something we can tackle next year.
Hi, just trying to wrap my head around this - Hubspot has a service helpdesk platform, but you can't add a shared mailbox such as a support@mycompany.com email? This is like the most basic feature of a helpdesk platform ever. We are migrating from Salesforce. It's not even a clarification I thought to ask.
Unfortunately your understanding is correct. We won't leave HubSpot because of it. We wouldn't have migrated to HubSpot from Salesforceoriginally if we had understood this limitation though.
Your options are either:
(1) One of the various 'hacks' discussed in this forum (including one posted by us that worked for about a year until it didn't).
(2) Add an extra MS O365 Licence and create a fake user sharedbox@domainname.tld and give all staff access to the credentials so they can add it as an outlook account also. This is now our approach and costs us around $200 in MS licence fees and around another $50 per user each year sorting out the ongoing sys admin of this.
As you'll discover, you'll still need to use outlook regularly anyway (for basic email formating such as adding tables or simply unravelling the convuluted nested threads attached to the incorrect contact that regularly occur).
You therefore need a solution that allows each user to also have the email available in Outlook (or other client) as Hubspot is missing key basic features that have been standard in such email clients for 10-15+ years.
@NickTT Wow, that is nuts. Given that we have not truly migrated yet, I am just piloting it, what would you have switched to? This is very unfortunate.
@LElfassy@EricHirsh We would likely still have switched to HubSpot. It's now clear however that HubSpot see email as a 'technical backwater'. Basic things like this and the abilty to have a table (yes - inserting a price table in an email quotation is not possible in HubSpot) don't get fixed. Meanwhile various 'AI' features that nobody is actually asking for get developed and released.
Like many businesses, our customer interaction is 95% via email. Until HubSpot start listening and sorts out the basics of their email so it works like it's 2025 not 2005 we won't be upgrading to any of the more expensive packages as staff will use continue to use workarounds outside of HubSpot. During 2025 we will start researching to move elsewhere unless HubSpot starts to view a functioning email system as a cornerstone of it's CRM.
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