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!
We need this quickly. Sooner the better. We've had to disable our email to keep from polluting our database further. Our support email has been in use for years and we don't want to disable that. However, it is used by multiple team members and also receives a ton of spam, all of which are creating new contacts we don't want in the database. Unable to fully implement our Ticketing system until this issue is fixed.
Any updates on this? Workarounds? Customer is thinking about disconnecting conversation inbox due to this problem. Automatic contact creation needs to be limited. Thank you.
Any updates on this? It's been a submitted idea for a number of YEARS now. we work with partners AND end users so this is causing a lot of uneccessary 'fluff'i the CRM, and as the only admin it's becoming almost a full time job just catchig and cleaning all the contact and assocaiated company that Hubspot keeps auto creating. I'm sure I can't be the only one that finds this increasingly frustrating and time consuming?
I didn't realize how many years this has been in the queue. Hubspot peeps - we really need someone to take a look at this and address our needs. I've got a major project on hold waiting for the fix. Implementing this as it is will create tons of extra work that we can ill afford. Is there nothing that can be done to get this elevated?
I don't see why it should not be possible to simply write the source of a contact (e.g. "CONVERSATION") into an according (already exisiting) property to be able to create a data-quality workflow to at least be able to identify the contacts automatically created via conversation inbox. this would help to create further workflows to automatically delete the ones not needed in the database.
Hi everyone, my name is Cambria - I'm a Product Manager on the Conversations team. Thank you to everyone who has upvoted this discussion, shared your use cases, and added your thoughts and opinions over the past several months.
Before we dive into things, I just want to say that this feature was absolutely not designed to push any of our customers above their contact tier limit.
Contacts are the beating heart of HubSpot, and we want to empower teams using the Inbox to have remarkable 1:1 conversations, largely leveraging the power of contacts so they can have a 360 degree view of who they're talking to and previous interactions they might've had with their team.
That said, we know there's a few problems with our current system.
1) Contact tier limits - we know this is a problem and we're exploring solutions internally on how we can address this. 2) Filtering - we need to improve our system for filtering spam/undesirable emails so they never get to the point where they're being added as contacts anyway. We're planning on tackling later this year after some core email infrastructure work we're doing in the first half of the year.
I know this may not be the response you hoped for, but thank you again for all your feedback and patience with this issue. We'll keep this post updated when we have further announcements to share on progress here
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This would lead you to believe they are looking at the Tier Limits not the problem
They also think the issue is spam or undesireable emails this is not the case
These are genuine businesses that we should be able to chose if we want them on our CRM as a contact
Why facilitate a forum if you are not going to listen to people concerns
They must monitor this, so therefore dont care if this is an issue
The 2 solutions Hubspot will be working on do not directly address the issue on this thread. The problem is not the amount of spam. It is the unnecessary creation of contacts AND their associated companies from the many VALID but unintended email addresses. A system that puts the contacts in a separate group, e.g. conversaion group, and allows us to go through them and manually add the contacts (and automatically add the associated companies) is a much better solution. This way, Hubspot doesn't need to work on option 1 as long as the contacts in this chat group do not count toward the contact tier limit. Hubspot can take its time to improve the spam filter which will benefit everyone using Hubspot.
The issue is actually a big problem. It’s the fact that conversations creates contacts and our emails are linked to the system. So for example, a conversation automatically creates my contact card and then all my employees can see my emails.
Just received an email stating "data privacy and security as a top priority."
From August 22, any team members who aren't using two-factor authentication will start to receive an email to set up this security feature.
We understand your business puts its trust in HubSpot. This is why we continue to invest in our platform, with data privacy and security as a top priority. We've adopted a new policy to require two-factor authentication for all users of HubSpot accounts. HubSpot users in your organization will get an email with instructions to complete the setup within 30 days.
So now they want to inconveneince users by making them login/authenticate twice in the process surely collecting the login source yet they continue to log CC email addresses of users who do not consent have not been notified etc etc.
HubSpot you are going down the wrong track! The additional cost of SF is starting to not look so bad!
This is still an issue, and we are suffering. Without admin oversight, we increased our contact count, but we have been creating junk contacts that are not adding value to our efforts. The team can't see the wood for the trees anymore and is suggesting we give up on Hubspot and just use a competing platform and I am inclined to agree with them.
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