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.
@Dylan has informed us in Aug. that it is on Hubspot's radar and will be worked on in the coming months.
Maybe Hubspot can make a workaround in the backend that allows us to delete an email and HS will assisgn the Contact an email which it knows is not real, will not be shown to us but will work for them in the back?
I'd set a monthly reminder to check on this enhancement, and noticed the change last night. When clicking the user's email to edit, the option appeared to the right to 'Delete' the primary email. In all of my updates last night, it worked as designed, and I no longer have an invalid None.com company or email domain. 😁
If you're not seeing the same, HubSpot may be rolling this enhancement out in groups so hopefully a short wait should provide my same results for your team.
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!
Yes, @KJLUNDE - my pleasure! Now looking forward to more of these great ideas that are cooking below the surface and slowly getting released by @Dylan and the team!
I'm pleased to see that we can finally delete email fields. I have a list of 3054 contacts where I've set the email field to a dummy value. I would like to delete this field for those records now. I tried selecting them all and choosing 'edit' but it doesn't give me 'email' as a property that I can change. I've tried exporting and importing them with the contact id and an empty email field but that didn't overwrite the field. Can you help?
I'd also like this functionality. I think it's a bug that you can't already do it because you can manually go into the contact and delete the email field, so why not allow it via workflow?
Our process is when a contact leaves a company we keep their contact record (and LinkedIn bio), remove the association to a company and wipe their email address. That way, once we engage with them in their new role we can populate their new email address but have a record of the historic discussion with them
I've discovered a way of doing this... you can copy a field from one field to another - so if you use your Workflow to copy "Alternative email" to "Email" then if Alternative email is always blank then Email will be blanked. Not ideal but a way round it... you could perhaps extend that by creating a custom field which is always blank and using that.
Hi @DarrenSimons I tried your work-around now, to set my Workflow to copy "Alternative email" to "Email", but I get an error message that says "The contact property couldn't be copied. The record doesn't have this property or the property doesn't have a value." How did you get around that one?
Hi @DarrenSimons I've tried your work-around now, I've added a field with alternative email and used a workflow to copy this empty field in to the email field, but I keep getting this error message "The contact property couldn't be copied. The record doesn't have this property or the property doesn't have a value." (the contacts does have that property "alternative email"). Who did you get around this?
This thread says the 'delete email address' feature was added 4 years ago and I see that functionality in HubSpot, but it's not working properly for me... I have the ability to delete someone's email address from their contract record and everything looks like it worked properly, but the next time I visit that contact their email address has magically popped back into their contact record. This is incredibly problematic as the email addresses I'm deleting are ones that have hard bounced (but we need to keep the contact for other reasons) & having bounced emails to them will affect our reputation score if we email them again in a general mailing.
How do I permanently delete an email address from a contact?
It looks like @DarrenSimons workaround no longer works. Bit of a bummer that you can't sanitise records... I'm just trying to purge all the additional emails from contact records, then create new contacts for each of those additional emails.
I think this issue has been resolved by Hubspot. I've now got a manual enrolment workflow called OnClearEmail Address and all it does is Edit record, and Clear Email <-- it was the Clear Email that didn't work before, but I think it's fine now.
Yeah it only works if the Email field only has a single email. If it has additional emails it fails. That's the only difference between the two images... and the error is pretty much useless.
