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.
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.
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!
This needs to be a new feature! It's frustrating that spam or sales emails can trigger new contacts in your CRM and potentially exceed your contact limit costing you more money.
We would love this feature. We support both partners and end users. We do not want end users being created as a contact as we don't want them to recieve any of our marketing emails, product updates email, or newsletters that are intended for our partners. As of now, we've been told we need to set up filters/workflows/special fields - workarounds that are not ideal.
And reading the above comment makes me very nervous about spam email addresses being created as contacts as well - eek!
This would be huge. We use this for our accounting department and they get emails from customers and venders. It would be nice to not create a contact for ever vender.
help! we're onboarding now and JUST turned on Conversations Inbox and literally have a dozen spammer or generic email we subscribe to that have created new contacts....
Please implement this feature! I understand the filtering tool, but we cannot filter every spam/random email in the world, that is not efficient and needs continuous monitoring, which basically makes extra work instead of making the existing one easier. Thanks 🙂
Just adding to all of the above! This is an incredible time waste of a problem, defeating the entire purpose of automated systems! I will have to disable inbound email completely (and could be driven away from the platform entirely) until this problem is solved by HubSpot.
Very strange default behavior, and I'm even more surprised it cannot be changed. I'd expect automatic contact creation for people I send mail to, but not every random person who contacts me! I'm evaluating HubSpot at the moment, and this is the only major turnoff I see for now - the sales pipeline and email features are looking very useful otherwise.
Agreed. We would definitely like the ability to put any potential new contact into a queue so they can be qualified by a sales person prior to being created as a physical contact in HubSpot.
I have found a temporary fix if you wish to continue to use the Conversations Inbox. I have saved a filter in my contacts tab that shows me any contact that was added from the conversations inbox. I run the filter daily and bulk delete the spam contacts that were added. I have done the same thing for companies. In the "Contacts Tab" 1. Add filter
2. Search for "original source drill-down 1"
3. Select "contains exactly"
4. type in "conversations" hit enter
5. click "apply filters"
6. Save and name the filter. Repeat steps 1-6 in the companies tab.
you can now use this filter regularly and use the checkboxes on the left-hand side to bulk delete each day/week.
The problem comes when you want to save some contacts and delete others. I have chosen to add another filter so that I can change that property and take the contact off the list. I have chosen to add "Original Source" is any of "Offline Sources". We now change that field in the contacts that we want to keep (specifically we change it to "Email Marketing") To make it easier for my colleagues, I have also added the "original source" property to the "my view section" in the contacts panel so that it is easy to access and change. Go to "view all properties" in any contact > search properties for "original source" > Click "add to my view"
I would like Hubspot to only log emails from known contacts in the CRM. The reason is that I have lots of people email me, including confidential emails I don't want made visible to everyone in the CRM.
I know that if I send an email and uncheck the log button, it doesn't log in the CRM. I also know that I can exclude a specific email address or domain in the settings so that it never logs emails from those people. The checkbox is only useful for stopping the logging of emails I sent, not those I receive (and also doesn't cover those cases where I sent from my phone or forget to uncheck the box). And, the email/domain exclusion is only useful if I am expecting emails from someone.
What we need is a setting when enabled, Hubspot only logs emails from my inbox that are existing contacts in Hubspot, and does not create new contacts from emails of people not in Hubspot. That way, if I have a confidential conversation with someone and give them my email address, and they email me, that email doesn't create a Hubspot contact and log the confidential email for everyone to see.
This is important as someone who wears lots of hats including both sales, and confidential things like HR and legal.
Piggy-backing on this thread.. this is a much-needed improvement to the conversations tool.
The only reason that I can imagine it hasn't been addressed is that Hubspot has a financial interest in additional contacts being added to your CRM in bulk; more contacts equals higher pricing tier.