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.
@EricHirsh I just came across this thread when dealing with unwanted contacts that were created after we connected a shared inbox to Conversations. I think we're mostly case #2 in the question you asked: The shared inbox I connected might receive emails that are leads and I would want to convert to contacts, but many other emails that we receive at the inbox are not leads at all, but sometimes something that we need to do relating to an existing contact.
As an example I'm looking at right now, we might work with one of our customers and eventually ask them to fill out a financing application. When they do fill out the application, this shared inbox receives a notification that the applicaiton was filled out. Ideally, I would love to log that email against the contact that filled out the application to note that they've filled out their application, but I don't see any way to do that as the email came from the finance application SAAS system, not from the customer.
But beyond that, we just get a lot of correspondance at the email address that we list publicly on the website, a lot of which might be spam or sometimes not spam but unrelated to sales, but sometimes is customers. I'd love to be able to just dismiss most of the emails that come in as not actionable, but optionally create a contact from an email if it is a lead, or to log emails on existing contacts if it is something operational related to a particular customer.
We're new to HubSpot, so working hrough multiple problems and solutions.
We have a Sales and a Service Team Inbox.
My first alert to this issue was that we get emails to our Service Inbox coming in as a Lead in the Prospecting Workspace, which was odd for our team.
We're a small team so we're kind of accepting some of these as useful. For example a few have been an existing customer who is emailing from a different email for a service/support. This does identify when a customer is suddenly using a new email and we can merge the contact. We've added some specific reasons to the Disqualification so we can hopefully exclude from the Sales Team's goals. But ideally these shouldn't be in the Prospecting Workspace. But we wold want to identify these and we do want an easy way to manage these requests within HubSpot.
We are working through how to better use our Team Inbox emails and are even thinking of a new Support Team Inbox to replace the Service Inbox as that particular email has been used for years and is possibly too bloated and complex for the purpose.
We love having the email/call/sms etc activity in the Contact/Deal/Ticket views. Wouldn't want to remove the sync - so helpful for all the teams.
We've only been using HubSpot for just over a week now, so I don't have any great ideas on how we'd like it to work. But perhaps it will always end up being more manual than we'd like, but would be good to make the process of selecting what you want to do with a contact very easy.
I'll add to my comments if we come up with any ideas / challenges in the next weeks
As a development engineer I have some sympathy for the HubSpot team, but this thread started in 2018 so that well has run dry.
We are a recent user of HubSpot and we only want to add pre-qualified contacts to our sales contact list.
These contacts are segmented and tagged as marketing contact for email campaigns, very simple and works well.
We want all email replies to the marketing campaign to be automatically recorded against the HubSpot sales contact.
If we use the Outlook Email client the user has to register an email reply to Hub-Spot manually from the Outlook 365 Email extension.
If this user is out of office then the reply is not registered in HubSpot until their return, which is unacceptable.
A solution is to create an Inbox channel and add the users here, then all inbound email from sales contacts is recorded against the sales contact in HubSpot, this works.
However, we do not want all emails hitting the channel users inbox from creating new HubSpot sales Contacts.
This is important as users may receive spam emails or more importantly private emails.
No one wants to find that thier GP has sent a private email and they are now a proud HubSpot sales contact and viewable by the whole organisation.
Spam is just a annoyance however private emails are far more serious for the user and for HubSpot, distributing private data breaks the law and will result in legal action.
Unless I am missing a setup option, I cannot see a method of preventing an Inbox Channel from automatically creating HubSpot Sales contacts.
If this case I am not sure how HubSpot has not addresed this problem.
The least the user could expect to see is the new contact created by the channel marked as "unqualified" and quarantined to an adjudicator.
I think that the set up options on the channel should be.
1) Default: Never create a sales contact automatically from a channel.
2) Option: Create sales contacts automatically for new email addresses.
3) Option: Create Sales contacts automatically for new email addresses where the email extension matches an exisitng company.
3) Option: Quarantine all automatically created sales contacts.
No Channel Option
A change that may solve many users problems is to add a hybrid option for those who have connected inboxes but are not using inbox channels.
An email option in general settings that says "Register all inbound emails for connected users where a Sales contact exists in HubSpot"
This would give the user confidence that inbound emails are being automatically registerd, but without the need to set up a channel and be swamped by emails creating unwanted contacts.
If you look futher up in the stream one user suggests that the issue is related to revenue, more contacts = more revenue.
If this is the driver for not adding the conact creation control then Hubspot is missing a trick.
The controls could be added as a chargeable feature, basic level+.
I am sure that there are many users who are managing hundreds spam emails who would pay $10 per month to automate the clean up (and protect their GDPR)
@TimDrew Yeah that was me. After my post they finally reacted. But as for all basic feature requests, nothing happens. Most of them are years old. I really liked you post and your option 3 suggestion.
@TimDrew Yes, that option 3! We have already entered all target companies as leads and are trying to find contacts and convert them. If these leads were to email, it would be nice if they were created directly as a contact and linked directly to the existing company. But the current way it only causes annoyance. So yes, there will have to be different options for different types of users. I can only imagine that option 3 won't work for your situation.
Just facing this issue now and found that this has been an ongoing discussion.
In response to @EricHirshAnd 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?
Currently our conversations are being used for our support inbox, and many support emails are from a user of our platform that has a simple one-time question, and there will most likely be no need to ever contact them again. So it's just a matter of a contact, and sometimes company, being created that is of no value to us.
Targeting marketing is the way forward, there is too much data in the market place to use a scatter gun method. For SME's trading B2B, collecting unvetted contacts from email streams is pointless and counter productive. Talking to other users many of them re-searching other platforms so they are not forced to manage the unwanted contact build up and the GDPR impact.
We develop all our own Data base and web facing software, never really had a problem toggeling a module off, or adding a filter.
I am not sure what is motivating HubSpot not to make this feature optional or as we discussed to filter or quarantine the content.
I guess that it comes down to desire or programming resources.
I'm joining in to shed some light on use cases where not having this is making Hubspot something we will have to move away from as a company.
I own a busy travel agency, we get leads that would be "deals" from many sources - web, returning clients, forms, social media etc.
Your comment:
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.
When using a shared team inbox to distribute leads, we also have returning clients who come directly to our own inbox - the problem is then connecting our business inbox to the teams - which we don't want to have 2 inboxes and extra pipelines. We have 1,000's of emails from suppliers, booking confirmations, changes, invoicing, support and back office. Being the owner, I also have all the business emails which is a volume far greater than sales/deals.
Client emails and contacts, perfect. However, bookings for the clients (many different sources) need to be sent to track under that client's deal. If I label a contact - Air Canada Vacations booking, Celebrity Cruise etc - but it is for one particular client, if I forward to that deal - I can't forward any others to their deals. Because the contact is now logged to one client.
The only workaround is if there would be a toggle to say "Do not log contact AND emails". Otherwise, I could get 20 Celebrity Cruise bookings come in, and any automation with forward ALL of them to every client who has booked one.
Not having the option is making HubSpot extremely manual and a lot of double entry. Having to save files, and then upload them to work around this. instead of being able to forward to the correct deal.
I'm hoping there is a workaround shortly, or sadly we'll have to move to multiple service options again as it can't be configured here.
Hi I think I understand your problem. It really it needs flow charting to be certain of the logic. Just to be clear, the key field in a contact is the email address, in addition HubSpot has a data base key for each contact record in your account.
Are you saying that when an email arrives from say bookings@easyjet.com you want to assign this email to another customer account with a different email address.
So you toggle don't file emails on easyJet.com allowing you to quarantine and assign to another contact.
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