HubSpot Ideas

jehiguese

Disable automatic contact creation for Conversations

HubSpot auto creates a contact for anyone that emails in - or is cc'd into a reply in conversations. For some customers who manage through support, this will mean a large number of contacts can enter the database. The only way to prevent this at the moment is by setting filtering rules, as all filtered emails do not create contacts. There is a use case from a customer in this post [Hyperlink removed by moderator as it linked to an archived Community post with duplicate information]

 

This is a request to build a "Create contact" rule giving us the option to disable automtically creating contacts for people we communicate with in Conversations.

 

372 Replies
LDowdy
Contributor

@EricHirsh  @MSlaughter 

I would agree with a previous poster that this is absolutely not ONLY related to "Conversations".  This should be a major, global setting.  For email responses, IF a Contact does not already exist, "Do not create the Contact".  I realize that Hubspot is a Contact tool, and you need to create Contacts based on different criteria, but why not implement the ability to NOT create contacts unless explicitly selected in a module?  Like in Forms, if a contact fills out a form, I completely would expect a Contact to be created, as you need to store their response with the Contact name.  But for a tool like email integration, you need a different model entirely.  Basically it should default to not creating Contacts unless someone specifically configured it to do so (but even then most would disable it for the same reason as you have hundreds or thousands of people asking for this to change).  NOBODY wants tons of unwanted, unhelpful email addresses clogging up their CRM and creating busy work.  If you think people are being frustrated or rude in their comments they have a very good reason to be.  It is shameful that this problem has been mentioned for 7 years.  This is ridiculous for a top-end Contact product to have ZERO way to be configured to keep random email responses from creating Contacts, which kicks off processes and wastes time.   

hohmann
Contributor

Please, please, please (pretty please with a cherry on top!)—just give us the option to turn this feature on or off. I'm sure there are users who find it helpful, but judging by the feedback, we’re one of many—perhaps close to 1,000 users—who would love to see this feature removed or at least made optional.

It’s a huge pain to go through and delete dozens of irrelevant contacts. Out of 20 suggestions, we might want to keep one. It would make a world of difference if we could simply manually add the contacts we actually need. That can’t be too hard to implement, right?

Thanks for considering! It would save us a lot of time and frustration.

EricHirsh
HubSpot Product Team
It would make a world of difference if we could simply manually add the contacts we actually need. That can’t be too hard to implement, right?

Arrested Development Narrator: It would be too hard. 

 

I'm still here folx, promise. In a previous post I allude to why the front-end of this feature seems dead simple, but the backend (our email system entirely supposes every message is associated with a Contact) would need an 'unknown visitor' treatment a la Live Chat.

 

Very very sympathetic to the current pain, wasted time folx are experiencing. Thematically, we are examining ways to make settings/features/configuration more consistent across all channels, email included. 

AbigailD
Member

Our team is finding it so frustrating that HubSpot creates a contact for everyone in CC. We've got a contacts list full of people we've never directly received an email from.

08190
Member

There are times when we might want to log an email sent via Outlook, but not some of the CC'ed recipients. It would be useful to exclude certain contacts in the email chain from having a contact entity created in this scenario.

CDan1
HubSpot Employee

+1

NAKOA
Member

This would be huge! Please update this feature!

hhiggins
HubSpot Product Team

Hi everyone!

This idea's status has changed from ‘Being Reviewed’ to ‘Idea Submitted’. This change is due to our improvement project to update our Ideas Forum statuses in order to provide better transparency into how we are listening to your feedback.

 

“Idea Submitted” means that our product teams are aware of this feedback and are monitoring the need for this feature alongside other inputs that determine their priorities & roadmap.

 

For more details about the statuses we use on the Ideas Forum & what they mean, you can read this community post here.

TMin
Member

This needs to be addresses. I have just had an instance where I've emailed sesnitive information - not to my customer, but rather to the original email address of an email my customer had forwarded to me - as Hubspot had pulled this third-party email address, created a contact for it and set their email address as the default to reply to (as it had assigned the ticket to the new contact).

VB47
Participant

Please offer this option asap 

JBosma6
Member

Hi, Eric.
From my perspective, we simply don't need to keep track of every single person that is ever copied on an email. We just need records for the people we communicate with directly. We're using Hubspot's Data Quality tool. Unfortunately, by automatically adding everyone whose ever CC'd as individual records, you're also creating hundreds if not thousands of records with formatting issues. In almost all cases, the new records that are created only have an email address, so there's no first name, last name, company name, etc. 
If I want to scan through formatting issues to fix them, I've got to wade through a bunch of useless contacts to do it.
And there's no way to stop these useless records from being created.
James

MarkSwift
Member

+1