HubSpot Ideas

Stanczak

Delete email addresses from contact record

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.

Mises à jour HubSpot
Statut mis à jour : Delivered
January 18, 2021 11:56 AM

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! 

 

- Dylan 

Statut mis à jour : In Planning
August 13, 2020 06:50 AM

Hello HubSpot community, 

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. 

Statut mis à jour : Being Reviewed
March 30, 2020 08:33 AM

Hello HubSpot Community, 


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. 

108 Commentaires
dhartzer
Membre

I'm a new user to HubSpot with thousands of contacts migrated in for my sales team. We just sent out an email campaign and had several bounced emails so, naturally, want to clean up our database and can't do that because the system won't allow me to delete the bad address. There is no way I am going to delete the contact with years of history entered just to create a new one without an email. Seems like an easy fix to add an "are you sure you want to delete" button. I've been selling for over 16 years and my other CRMs allow us to delete so I'm hoping HubSpot will rethink their logic here. 

nathan_lbc
Participant

There has to be a way to delete an email address from a contact record.  Being unable to delete an email address in my CRM forces me to keep bad data in my records.  I hate bad data.

BB1
Contributeur de premier rang

Hi and Welcome @dhartzer and @nathan_lbc !

 

You can add an email address to the contact and then delete the old one.

 

Restating what @gelflex-cc answered above - If you don't have a new email for them but want to delete the old one, you can give it a different email address which you and your system will know is not real, like "wrongemail@"domain.com then you can make a list of anyone who's email starts with "wrongemail@" and exclude them from emails.

Filter in list for email starts with...Filter in list for email starts with...

 

To make that easier, you would have a general exclude list and can have multiple filters for that.

 

Hope that helps!

 

 

Filice
Membre

I can create a contact without an email, but I cannot delete an email from an existing contact.  In order to keep the contact information w/out the email, I have to delete the entire contact and re-enter all the information (excluding the email).....this is very time consuming.

 

I would be great to have the option of deleting the email from the contact w/out having to recreate the contact.

iats72
Participant

@BB1This is not a solution. In fact, it is at the heart of the issue. We want to be able to remove an email address when we don't have a replacement address (it is unknown). We don't want to be forced into providing a fake address as a place holder.

dhartzer
Membre

Thanks to you both for your suggestion and support! It is the best we have as a temporary fix until HS figures out this is a huge issue, hopefully. Having bad emails in a CRM is never a good idea and definitely causes confusion. 

BB1
Contributeur de premier rang

Sure @iats72 that is correct. It is only a workaround until the Hubspot team gets this fixed...

laydeestlz
Participant

Yes! on all of the above.  Need a solution for this and creating a new contact or opting out is not a solution.

nathan6343
Membre

Due to Hubspots stupid rule not to allow deletion of a contacts email address. We have deleted the entire contact.

This is yet another stupid Hubspot problem. Another reason to move to Pipedrive.

stuartu
Participant

this is a crazy restriction.   Our company has 190k contacts, and is an administration nightmare adding fake email addresses.

having to add another field(s) as a workaround where it should just allow a simple blanking out.  

iats72
Participant

@gelflex-cc  You just described having to use a fake email address. "use bad_  before the email address". We don't want this. We want to be able to leave it blank instead of using a fake email address. It shouldn't be this complicated. Once we realize that the address is no good, HubSpot won't allow us to simply delete and leave it blank.

LenForsyth
Membre

We need this functionality as well.  This is a real problem.

nathan6343
Membre

We have followed some of the suggestions in this thread.

We just prefix all of the old email addresses with 'hubspot.inept'.

luke023
Membre

This is unbelieveable.  I have contacts who move companies, but I still know them and want to keep them and their history until I get their new details - so I'm just having to use none1@none.com - terrible UX!

Swiss-Biotech
Participant

We too will need the feature, that an invalid e-mail address can be completely deleted, even if it leaves the e-mail field blank - With a blank e-mail field you will need to look for a new e-mail. To still have the contact, even without e-mail, however (also for history), is important. Please remove this restriction of not being able to delete mail addresses, if there once was an email address that got invalid. Thank you!

KayleeG
Participant

The ability to clear an email address needs to be available.

 

We had a huge record import where a few columns became misaligned including email address; Couldn't re-import to overwrite the records with the correct data, couldn't clear out the email field to do an import for corrections.

We're having to add fake emails to records just to be able to make the needed corrections.

 

Deleting these records and losing connected data is not an option, yet we may end up muddling those connections with our workaround which I'm very unhappy about. Better that than losing everything however.

marketingcafe
Participant

I am also facing this issue. Hubspot to give a solution to this

sminer
Membre

To piggy back off everybody else, not being able to delete an email from a contact is crazy.

 

I accidentially merged two customers together with the same name. There are now two email addresses associated with one contact. One of the emails is obviously incorrect. I need to unmerge the contacts, and the only way to do this is to create a new contact with one of the two emails. However, I cannot delete an email from the existing contact (even though there would still be a primary email in place for the existing contact). I don't understand why Hubspot can't change this so that emails can be deleted so long as at least one email exists for a contact. I don't see the harm in that and it would prevent people from adding faulty data to their contact records, as I will now have to do. Super super annoying.

BB1
Contributeur de premier rang

Hi @sminer you can do that - you need to set the email you want to keep as the Primary, then you can delete the other. You can then recreate the original contact and use that email.

sminer
Membre

@BB1 The email I wanted to remove was not the primary email and I still could not delete it. My understanding from reading all these comments is that Hubspot does not allow you to delete an email from any email field, regardless of if it's the primary email or not.