I know it's seen as bad practice and I know why HubSpot doesn't currently allow it.
But really guys, sometimes we actually do need to delete an email address from a contact record.
I have historical contacts with important notes and history that have never had a valid email address in the email property. Or, someone in our organization entered a bad email address years ago and now it's permanently enshrined on the contact record, causing confusion and bounced marketing emails.
Perhaps when a HubSpot user attempts to clear an email address you can present us with a dire warning and then let the user make that decision themselves. Or, make it an advanced permission that only administrators can enable for themselves.
Either way, deleting the contact record or creating custom properties (as suggested here) are not viable solutions.
Hello HubSpot community! As @Apocalyps already noticed, this functionality is officially live in all HubSpot accounts as of a few days ago. I had been holding off on posting until we had ironed out some of the potentially misleading messaging that @BB1 noticed, but looks like you all beat me to the punch in noticing 😉
We'll be cleaning up that messaging this week, but, in the meantime the functionality is available for all to use. Thank you as always for your continued input here on the community forum. We're always listening and it helps us build a better product!
I'm excited to let you all know that this is something we are planning to work on in the coming months. At this time I don't have a specific timeline for delivery but will update this post once we do.
Thank you as always for your continued feedback, it helps us build a great product.
We are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our priorities and roadmap to deliver as much value to our customers as possible. The request to remove the last email address from a contact is an interesting one. Based on the comments and use cases you all have listed, we are reviewing this request and its feasibility among other priorities on our roadmap. At this time I don’t have any details around timing or delivery, but thanks to the comments and votes on this post we’re actively looking into what it would take to solve this problem.
How do I simply delete an email address from a contact record... Each time I try to delete it and save, the old email pops up again. I just want to remove the old incorrect email until I get the correct one to replace it..... How to do dat? 🙂
Once a contact has an email address added to their contact record, the Email property cannot be replaced by a blank value, it can only be replaced by another email address. I certainly understand the logic behind wanting to clear it out, but the tool isn't built to allow that to happen.
A couple workarounds that might help are:
- Remove the contact record entirely, and create a new one without an email address. The downside to this is that any data associated with the current contact record will be lsot if you delete the contact record.
- Create a custom contact property that acts as a flag to indicate which contacts need to have their email address updated. Once you change the email address you can remove the value from the custom contact proeprty so you'll know that the email address is then the valid one. I picture the property as a single checkbox property like "Need updated email address" and you can check the box if so and leave it blank if not.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
It's unbelievable not to be able to change our own data.
Or try to detect / tag wrong email adresses.
For example : some of my email adresses are wrong (the contact leaves his company, but i still need to keep him as i want to be in touch in the futur).
Thank you for providing feedback regarding the how the product is currently working. If you do want to be able to update the email address, I would recommend adding a personal email address until you have a new professional email address for the user. If you would like the functionality to change, I would recommend creating an idea in our ideas forum so that our developers can see your idea, other users can vote for your idea, and to increase the likelihood of your idea being implemented in the future.
Currently, if I have a contact with an email address entered in the email field, I cannot delete the email and leave the email field blank.
Sometimes an email address is incorrect or old and it bounces. I don't want to use that email address anymore, and I don't want any of my present or future colleagues wasting their time trying to use that email address.
Thus, if I can't find a good email address for a contact, I want to leave the email field for that contact blank.
We need this feature as well, although for a different reason. We have a few contact records that contain legitimate notes and history, but the email address has always been wrong.
However, for your needs (contact leaves company) I would suggest you look into the Lead Status field and filters. For us, once an account rep learns that someone has left a company, we set lead status to "No Longer With Company". Now the dead contact can be filtered from view and automatically removed from future marketing emails. Leaving the old contact record as is does not present a problem. Once our people reconnect at this person's new job we create a new contact record at the new company with a note pointing back to his previous record. This allows us to preserve the full record of where they came from and what they did at the old company while continuing the relationship.
agree this is required. we have clients that give us thier worke mail and then move jobs, and it can be a while before we get a new email - and we keep in touch via phone. Also we are in South Africa and a lot of our clients dont even have an email address. I dont want to keep putting contacts on email lists when I know they dont have a valid email.
This is phenomenally lame and is one of the reasons we might leave Hubspot. We simply do not have email addresses for many of our contacts, and we cannot get them. When we imported contacts into Hubspot, it auto-fiilled with wrong email addresses, and now we can't get them out. I created a fake one, cantfind@cantfind.com, and now it won't let me use that more than once. Please fix!! This is so stupid.
This restriction is really not well thought out. We have plenty of contacts where we only have phone numbers and no email addresses, what are we supposed to do with those? It's making it very hard to automate processes. It would be nice to at least have the choice between phone number or email as required fields, not solely email.
Yup. New HubSpot user here too and I'm in the process of cleaning up our contact list. There are contacts that have left their old jobs but are still valuable. We just need to find their new emails! I have them associated with the new company they're working at, however their contact page still shows their old company logo as their contact photo due to their old email address! In order to correct that I had to make a dud email address 😞
