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.
Apart from the data privacy issue that this problem arises, it is really hard to understand, why this issue has not been resolved since it came up years ago already.
Came here to find out that this issue, that really is a basic feature, still hasn't been resolved. It seems like HubSpot has been ignoring all kind of basic feature requests so their devs can focus on transforming a once nice solution to some sort of a Microsoft Dynamics recreaction with enterprise capabilties only. The only reason I can think off is that HubSpot has a relentless hunger for data so they want to absorb as many contact info as they possibly can. The lack of feedback or communication on this "issue" is suprising as they position themselfes as a userfocused company. I'll guess that time has long gone.
@Anonymous I'm as eager for this update as you are, but to say that Amazon or Salesforce care more about their users than Hubspot is categorically, laughably untrue.
@NVillarreal5 you must have never dealt with AWS support in your life. Salesforce obviously cares about their users since they already have this functionality in their CRM.
Thank you for continuing to upvote and comment on this Idea, even when there hasn’t been a HubSpot response for a long time. A long-running pain point deserves a thoughtful response, and we want to take the time to give one to you because you deserve it.
It might look like we haven’t been listening (and that is painful in and of itself), but we have been passively following and have now had enough preliminary discussions that I can move it into “Being Reviewed.” This does not mean we are building a solution right now or saying anything about ‘when’ but it does mean we are thinking carefully about implementation, and doing so in a way that solves more customer problems than it creates.
Some housekeeping, since the original issue was opened in 2018 and HubSpot looked very different then
I am interpreting this idea to be specifically about when customers connect team-monitored email addresses (such as for customer support) to the Conversations Inbox and also Help Desk, where, yes, it is currently the case that an email message from a new email address does automatically create a contact, and there are currently no settings to adjust or disable that.
I see comments about suggestions for, and workarounds with, our Gmail or Outlook extensions. The way that personal email addresses (e.g. for individual sales reps) connect to HubSpot is a different (but related) system, so any feedback you have about contacts, automatic creation, logging, never-logging, etc should be handled in separate Ideas posts than this one.
One of the main critiques in the comments is that HubSpot might be ignoring fixing this issue so that it can generate revenue by increasing the number of contacts in a customer’s account. This is not true. Since the last update to this Idea by a HubSpot product manager, HubSpot implemented that contracts are based off of the number of marketing contacts in an account.
Two important things to know about the Conversations Inbox
It does not automatically create contacts for email addresses from messages flagged by the system as Spam.
It does not create marketing contacts. At all. All of the contacts created by Inbox are “non-marketing” contacts.
This of course doesn’t lessen the pain for any of you that are struggling to manage messy CRM data.
It seems to me like there are at least two camps of frustrated customers here
Those whose team email addresses connected to the inbox are receiving an undue amount of spam, and for various, and possibly different reasons, our Spam system is not flagging them. Thus contacts are getting created.
Those who do want to receive and respond to all of the legitimate (non-spam) messages that come into their team email address in Inbox, but for some (and possibly various/different) reasons do not want to manage those messages against contacts created in the CRM.
Does that sound right? Does anyone else have a fundamentally different use case?
HubSpot has made improvements in spam handling over the years. Could anyone in Camp #1 please comment with any patterns you detect in the volume and type of messages you get and where you see our Spam filtering working vs not working?
And Camp #2, I’m really curious to hear about the relationship between wanting to monitor and reply to inbound messages in Inbox but not associate those messages with any contacts in the CRM. Why is this? Does it have to do with the amount of inbound messages you receive? Whethere they are current customers, high quality leads, or very low quality leads? Does it depend on if you are using an Inbox for customer support, or maybe pre-sales or event marketing? Does it have to do with a given team email address being used possibly by too many teams for too many purposes?
Multiple people are asking for, and think it’d be ‘easy’ to ‘add a toggle.’ It’s understandable to want a quick solution to stop the pain ASAP.
Someone else commented “My guess is that it is not a simple "fix". If they want to change to add this feature, it breaks more functions in Hubspot.”
For email, at least, this is why we are more carefully considering a solution. You might be familiar with the concept of ‘visitors’ vs ‘contacts’ especially with our Live Chat channel. An implication of the community-proposed solution is something akin to ‘email visitors’ instead of ‘email contacts’ on the backend of our conversations system - we need something, if it is not a CRM object, to associate all the different email conversations to over time. Visitors vs Contacts has implications for Reporting, Automation, and other key features for customers who want to efficently manage customer relationships in the Inbox.
Thanks again for your honest feedback. It is important to us!
Any news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread, so stay tuned!
@EricHirsh I'm part of the second camp. I'm used to marking things as spam, so it doesn't necessarily bother me that I receive spam in Hubspot because I would still receive it in any other system I use. My issue is that it's not as simple as deleting the message or marking it as spam. Once the message is deleted we need to delete the company associated with the contact and the contact. Therefore, now there are a dozen clicks involved with deleting one email.
The reason I delete these contacts and companies is because if the person is not a current or former prospect, client, vendor, or employee I don't want their information in our system.
Thanks for your thoughtful response and for addressing a lot of what has been festering over the years of waiting for a fix, here. I will try to respond point by point, as we are part of the community who would really benefit from having the capacity to turn off auto-contact creation within the Conversations Inbox.
Your interpretation:
Yes, I believe that is the correct way to frame the issue. When a team email is connected to a conversations inbox, any email received by that team email address appears in the Conversations Inbox and a contact is automatically created in the CRM. There are currently no settings available to adjust when someone is created (whether that be rules based on domain, a manual toggle, a checkbox per conversation that is opened, etc.). Any email that comes through that is not filtered out as spam creates a contact, point blank, even if they are on the account-wide "Never Log" list. Even HubSpot notifications that need to hit a team inbox create new contacts (and if we mark them as spam, the team will then never receive those notifications). The problem is so pervasive that we have actually taken most of our team emails back out of the Conversations Inbox tool after doing an entire ramp-up and rollout a year ago. It is tedious to rely on email client capacity here for shared inboxes, but it's better than what this functionality resulted in for our CRM and its data.
The customer camps:
We fall into this camp, 100%. The team email that sees the majority of the issues related to this post is our sales@ email address. This email address is intended to catch a lot of information from our customers and our partners (specifically things like purchase orders, vendor quotes, and requests from customers who don't have a designated sales rep at our company). When messages are coming from those folks, it works well. The email thread is associated with the Contact we want and (while we'd love to be able to edit associations directly in the inbox - this is a different conversation) makes it easy to update basic contact information from within the Inbox.
However, this email address is also overloaded with spam. Some true spam (phishing emails, etc.) and some just cold outreach from other companies looking to sell us on a service. While I'm sure some things are caught by the spam filters, we incessantly see contacts created for inumerable amounts of both of the above. Even for email address that should fall under our "Never Log" criteria (like "gmail.com"), contacts are still created. Because of that, our Contact object is overloaded with useless and cumbersome records that take a lot of manual time to clean up.
We also fall into this camp, some of the time. Because the team inbox where we primarily see this issue (sales@) is also meant to be for cold outreach from potential customers who find us online or hear about us through word of mouth, we get email messages that are important and need to be addressed, but don't always turn out to be valuable or the right fit. It would be great to have an initial back and forth with these potential customers before the system creates them for us. The other two aspects that we see that I think fit here are:
This team inbox is also where our sales reps forward POs that are sent to them directly, or where other potential customers are referred if they do outreach to someone ill-equipped to help them, because the team that manages the Inbox is who will be helping with those things. It is very common that one of our users forwards a purchase order to sales@ or even copies sales@ into an email thread, saying, "I'm copying this team and they can help you." Every single time that happens, a contact for one of our registered HubSpot users is created. Despite having added them to the never log list AND despite them already being a user. Because of this, we had to create a workflow long ago that automatically deletes them every morning and every afternoon.
Secondarily, we are a B2B company, but we offer some community programs in partnership with other companies that sometimes put us in touch with individual consumers. We have a support email address designated specifically to address any issues the individuals may experience with our community program, as we want to make it easy for them to reach out. We also want to track these issues in HubSpot (via Tickets) so that we can evaluate our process and offerings to be better in the long-run. However, we don't want individual consumers to be added as Contacts. We want to receive their outreach, we want a ticket to be created, and we want to resolve their problem, but we are fine to manually associate the company (or use any number of other means to make that association) and we don't want that individual contact record created.
I'm sure there is a third aspect to this if and when the problem is resolved, as it'd be great to be able to manage other types of conversations in the Conversations Inbox without it creating contacts. Some that come to mind are procurement needs (if we want to receive all RFP notifications to a shared inbox and have that information living in a single system - HubSpot - so we don't have to click between an email client and HubSpot for different team inbox needs, but don't want a contact created for every automated notification we receive) and other basic notifications (like submission confirmations, registration confirmations, shipping notifications, etc.) that need to go to a team (for example, events@) but that we don't want to generate new contacts. This isn't the core of our needs, it's just some additional use-cases I've surmised in the last two minutes while thinking this through.
Visitors vs. Contacts:
I don't dislike this idea. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm not sure I have a perfect solution for the infrastructure of all of this on your end, but to be fair to us as the consumers, that's not our responsibility. What I will say is that having the capacity to manually (or via automation, set parameters, or whatever else) identify when a Conversation turns into a Contact, similar to Lead Stages or even the way the new Leads object is intended to function, would be a game-changer. If this takes the form of "visitors" vs. "contacts," that's fine. And again, I don't understand your limitations on the backend, but I would advocate that it's not an object, at all. Or - if it has to be - that the object is "Conversations" and that's all it is. We want the capacity to decide when:
An email is spam, and will be blocked from then forward (which we can currently do)
An email is important, but merely a notification/informative/non-contact driven message and therefore shouldn't become one
An email is a potential customer, but may not need to turn into a Contact just yet (though I care least about this, as any valid outreach can become a contact that can be deleted later and we're okay with that, this is just wish-list granularity)
An email is from a valid sender whom we either already have or want to be a Contact in our CRM (at which point we can click "create contact" if they aren't already)
In summation:
The most user-friendly solution that I've come up with is that "create contact" button, maybe with a toggle to control whether it happens automatically or not within individual Team Inboxes (meaning we have to click that button to do it, or for every email it just happens, sectioned out by team email address). Being able to stop spam, our own users, and basic notifications like shipments, from HubSpot, etc. from creating new contacts constantly would be huge. Thanks for reading all of this and I hope it's helpful for you and your team!
Being able to hit "spam" or "never log" or whatever on the individual message, and then having that action follow through to the automatically created Contact and Company records may be a creative way to address this problem without having to change something at the core of HubSpot's infrastructure.
If when I hit "spam," it marked that address as spam and forever filtered out their email, then deleted the newly created Contact Record (and Company, if it didn't already exist in our CRM), that would be awesome.
Similarly, if when I hit "never log" or something, it deleted that Contact (and stopped it from creating it again on the next email, adding it to the new-and-improved Never Log list that in this made-up scenario now works in conjunction with the Conversations Inbox), but DIDN'T filter out those messages because they are important notifications, that would also be awesome.
Without addressing every point in each of them, I too want to make a note about "Never Log" (which is distinct from Allow/Deny lists, and I know that confuses some customers). I appreciate you bringing it up. It's helpful to hear about the relationship between 'never log' and 'disable auto contact creation.'
I don't think there is a post in the Ideas forum about it, but in our internal tools for tracking customer support requests, the fact that the Conversations Inbox currently does not respect the CRM Never Log list is a top item. And, actually, it would be fair to call that "Being Reviewed" as well.
We can look into Inbox respsecting the Never Log list - open question about whether that should be admin configurable, or just, standard.
Similar to auto-contact-creation, the devil is in the backend details.
Below is how we use hubspot. We ate a staffing company with sales, marketing teams and ofcourse our candidates/employees.
We are using hubspot as a ticketing tool for our incoming hr, accounts, contracts and many more shared mailboxes. While we want these emails saved so we can go back and search for previous conversations easily by typing the name of an employee, we don’t want our marketing or sales team to send emails to them.
If there’s a way to separate these databases or a way to not be visible to our sales and marketing team unless they explicitly want to search those contacts, those contacts should not be visible. Our license usage between sales, marketing teams and the service hub inbox users are completely different.
Can you add the ability to add office365 shared Mailboxes as we can add in missive or frontapp? Also ability to snooze a conversation by right clicking on it or a visible option on the screen?
We have our sales@ inbox connected - so are a victim of a very high volume of spam (mostly advertised services). We have a staff member spend two hours a week deleting spam contacts and companies. The suggestion someone else has made here of a config option that deleting a spam email would also delete the created contact and company would meet our needs. Ideally we would rather the option to 'create a contact/company' from the conversation (and the auto create is off), however the auto delete functionality as an interim would go a long way.
Would a solution be to only create contacts and companies from conversations that are replied to? Then there would be a behavior based filter.
For our part, our hello@ email needs to be monitored, but i haven't gotten a single legit contact from it, so it is causing me a ton of cleanup work. If we hit the reply button that would signal we want to talk to the person and thus should create.
Hi @EricHirsh & everyone thanks for your the replies.
We currently don’t have the email sync with hubspot turn on.
As we don’t want every email to current a contact or company. It would create too much tidy up work. We have decided to not have the emails to sync with Hubspot, which is a shame as would be really helpful to have email conversations in the contact.
I was the one who said its not a simple fix, would break more stuff.
We create contacts via hubspot forms, and via Zapier integration with our management software.
Its just having emails conversation in our CRM we are missing.
@EricHirsh Thank you for your detailed answer and summary.
@all We have built a workflow, which deletes User have some properties we think they fit into Spam, Advertising, kind of Non-Customer.
We have conversations from contacts with strange links, names, attachements on a regular basis. So you told us that you improved the spam settings, but I think there are cases you don't intercept in your rules. And those contacts are really annoying. Let's say, thats ok. But then I have the wish, that when we declare those contacts or conversations as spam, they should be deleted. And the domain should be putted on ban list 😉
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