HubSpot Ideas

jehiguese

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.

 

HubSpot Updates
February 07, 2024 10:14 AM

Thanks @dave-kimble and @cjl2016 for your quick and equally thorough replies.

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. 

Being Reviewed
February 07, 2024 08:53 AM

Hi folx,

I’m Eric Hirsh, a Product Manager in Service Hub.

 

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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!

 

Sincerely,

 

Eric

351 Replies
KKaiser85
Member

Guuuysss!!!! 

Could it be this simple? I just tested this and it seemed to work. 

In your inbox, you can select your log and track settings. If you get rid of logging new contacts, it won't create it in your CRM. 

Basically, you only want to log emails for exisiting contacts... these are either inbound leads or leads you have uploaded yourself as qualified to be in the system. 

 

It seems to be working for me.... hope it helps you! 

HWerntz
Participant

@KKaiser85 are you referring to your email or a shared email inbox? We are having issues with inbound emails to our info@ and support@ emails, not james@company.com type addresses

KKaiser85
Member

@HWerntz 

For is it was always a single email. If it's happening to your shared email, it must have the sales extension turned on? If so... I would imagine the same settings apply. 

TedRhea
Member

I came here to see if there was a solution and I can't believe after 3 years there still isn't a solution. It seems as if there should be a "Click box" on the hubspot to exclude domains or emails from being logged as a contact. Even deleting contacts won't solve the problem because as soon as they reply a new contact is created. 

 

Solution: 

In the Hubspot extensions add a click box to never create contacts based on domain or specific emails. In Outlook or Chrome add in the same feature. 

Jung_Yueh_Lien
Participant | Diamond Partner

Since the need was raised,

there still hasn't been a solution after five years. 😃

 

Today 20230502

Lele_Mk
Participant

To add to the use cases stated before for providing more control on auto-contact creation, we sync our product sign-up contacts to HubSpot. Then a marketing email is sent to the sign up to schedule a meeting via a meeting link. The contact fills in a different email to the sign up email address. Then HubSpot creates a duplicate record, one which does not have our product contact id, resulting in a broken integration between our product and HubSpot.

Evgenii
Participant

any news?)

SRandoll
Participant

yes, indeed very annoying that we have to pay for SPAM contacts etc.! please fix this!

Seth_Morris10
Member

How many more upvotes do you need before you make a change?  What's the point in having a system like this if you're not going to listen to your customers?

Jung_Yueh_Lien
Participant | Diamond Partner

When you're redirected to the community, it usually means that there's no solution available, and you should quickly explore alternative methods. I believe HS has the capability to address this matter, but currently, fulfilling your specific request is not a priority for HS. However, with ChatGPT, HS can immediately react and respond by creating a chatspot! 
😁

BramvdBemt
Member | Elite Partner

@cdewey22 any updates on this ticket? I see it has been two years since the idea was submitted but I could not find the function. 

MP22
Member

I second this. Any update?

SOperations85
Member

Any update on this idea? Hope to get a setting tab to turn this feature on and off. 

SOperations85
Member

Any update on this feature? Looks like it's been over 2 years now. 

LParslow4
Member

Absolutely this needs to be looked at. I get so many spam emails from suppliers that it's causing un necessary clutter in my data records.

As they say, you put rubbish in; you get rubbish out - so this is bound to have an impact on the quality of data and it's time-consuming to keep deleting spam contacts. HubSpot is meant to make your life easier isn't it? Please make a fix for this soon 🤞

WTerpstra
Member

Are there any updates for this? I can see this issue is here since 2018 and is not solved yet? 

CDelCastillo
Participant

This is still an issue in 2023. Has this been resolved or forgotten about? 

TMyatNoe
Contributor

We want that feature.

 

 

FDonohue
Member

Adding my voice - should be an easy fix.

When we reply to an email cc'ing the whole world, they are all added to HubSpot - Yuck!

nomad
Member

It is clear that HS values the revenue from spam contacts higher that the time and costs spent by us with cleaning the spam. So very unbelievable.