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!
Thank you all so much for this feedback and direction! I will be reviewing this with the team and will post an update. We have a few upcoming features that should address some of this pain so I will share in the next couple weeks as we have a more details. Thank you!
It does if you take the time to read the instruction. We have over 100 contacts per day that we dont want as marketing contacts and we had to create a list to filter these out.
You can set a predefine to log all new contacts as none marketing ... if you dont then yes you are charged for ALL contacts!
@BMottram I did take the time to read it, and thank you. However this isn't the or a solution that good enough.
I want the option to turn off automatically of adding a conversation as a contact. I don't want to filter then out. I don't want they adding in the first place.
This has been an issue for years after reading many different threads. I have spoken to support who suggested I up vote this thread, as I'm not the only person wanting this fix.
Lol, exactly. I can't believe I'm still getting email notifications about this thread 3 years later, and still no solution. For a publicly traded company with a $308.00 USD price per share, it's amazing that they can't get this one simple aspect fixed.
PLEASE correct this issue for us. We use a Team Email for random inquiries, to accept purchase orders, etc. and it has also become a hub for spam outreach. Every single day, 10-20 spam / no-reply contacts are added minimum, and it is severely cluttering our CRM.
We simply want to turn off "auto-create contact" when someone emails a Team Inbox. If we want to create them, we can manually choose to do so. It has been three years since the Product Team indicated they were working on this -- can you please provide an update? Thanks so much!
Setting up our Hubspot Service now, and have run in to this issue. As this thread implies, this issue has existed for quite som time now. Please fix this, Hubspot.
I really need this feature for my team. We want to turn off "auto-create contact" as it is cluttering our CRM with poor data quality contacts (missing first and last name) and is causing a nightmare to filter through valuable / non-valuable contacts. A simple On/Off, or disable button in the global settings for admins would be great. Thanks.
Upvoting. We need the ability to only create contacts at our discression if they don't already exist in HubSpot. This seems like a big miss at this point to not have this capability.
This is ridiculous. We have been using HubSpot for a few weeks now and already the CRM is clogged with unknown Contacts and Companies and we spend more time removing then actually adding and working with the ones we are interested in.
It should be a feature to automatically add Contacts and Companies NOT the other way around. This should be basic core functionality that I as an admin can control who and when a contact or company is added to my CRM database.
As this basic functionality has not been fixed for a number of years, it might be because it benefits HubSpot and it is worth keeping it even if customers complain. 🙁
We are already looking for other CRM systems that support smaller companies.
The fix feels like it should be very simple - a toggle function to only record emails to pre-existing contacts and not auto-creating new ones. As an agency owner managing several HubSpot instances, this is consistently a frustration for clients AND a potential HR/privacy/legal issue.
Agreed, this is a major headache and a classic example of automation out of control. Please give us the option to control this feature (i.e. turn it off), as otherwise it creates additional, unwanted admin work which is time consuming and frustrating.
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