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!
I am a new user to Hubspot and have loved it until this point. I can't quite believe that this is the approach to an email integration - create a contact from every single person that I email.
I have lawyers, accountants, investors, team members, hiring candidates, hotel bookings all showing up in Hubspot - this frightens me and makes the email extension dangerous and unusable.
Please just allow us to manually create contacts only.
Hi, @mjashanks , maybe I can help a bit. There are two types of integrations (mainly): - the one that connects your personal email inbox to Hubspot, with the extension for Gmail or Outlook - the Hubspot inbox - where you connect a shared email to Hubspot, designed to facilitate the communication from the team to the entire outside world and vice versa.
This thread was built around the second - and the fact that every email received on the shared address connected in the Hubspot Inbox will create a contact and a company associated with that (if that is the case). And this happens for a lot of spam emails and such.
What you are describing looks like an issue related to the first integration mentioned by me above. The extension from Hubspot to your personal email. For this one, luckily, there is a simple fix. Inside the extension, there are some rules. You should go there, find "Log and track settings" and uncheck the options to "Log email" and "Track email". These will deactivate the automatic creation of contacts, but gives you the possibility to do it one by one, when you choose to. Check the attached images - for a Gmail integrations, Outlook looks a bit different, but the tools are the same.
Absolutely. We've had several private emails that have worked their way into the system. Certainly a privacy and confidentiality issue as well as the fact it is clogging up my systems. So much clean up and extra time wasted.
Come on Hubspot, we just want a simple button to click to create a contact. I can't believe this is still an outstanding issue after two years of being an open item. This is making me lose confidence in Hubspot's willingness to service their customer needs.
As another case, to agree with the others here. We use a support email address that creates Tickets through an inbox. The amount of Spam that we get, as the email is available publicly, is insane, and it makes HubSpot almost unusable, to the point that we are considering dropping it and going back to our old provider.
We NEED an option to better manage this, I'm not 100% sure that this is the 'Right" way to tackle this, but this is the closest thing to my issue that I can find here.
The "Support" product is almost useless for us in the current state as we spend more time deleting records than we do supporting customers.
Has this been followed up on? I actually have to have a task to delete unwanted contacts every week, which takes FAR more time than manually adding a contact when wanted.
As a HubSpot partner, this is very important to our clients who deal with a lot of sensitive information and utilize Service Hub for conversations, ticket processing, and serving their clients. We have heard from every level of leadership from one of our lighthouse clients that it is extremely important to shut off the automatic contact creation that is happening in the CRM whenever someone responds or sends an email from their inbox.
Users should not have to turn of their extension every time they don't want a contact created - and it makes using the HubSpot inbox seem like not the right solution. Please can we have an update on this?
Please pick up the ball on this one. We are beginning users and have already ran into this problem. I can't imagine how difficult it will be with a few more customer/leads. It has been 4 full years and no progress has been made... why? Hubspot, if you can't fix this, please explain it to us how you make more money from this?
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