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!
Our agency is considering moving away from Hubspot for this and a few other basic functions that are lacking. And it’s not just that they are lacking, we haven’t seen any efforts made to continue developing the CRM platform or service hub
Hi, is there any update on this? The last comment I can see says it will be updated in the next few weeks but this appears to be from June 2020? Apologies if I am missing something.
This is also a big issue for our company. It would almost require a full time position to filter thru the contacts and companies that are being automatically created via e-mail.
This is such basic functionality. No other CRM behaves like this, and I have to believe it is because Hubspot wants as many contacts within the system as possible, perhaps to charge more, or perhaps for its own purposes. I've been using this for a couple of weeks but will cancel the subscription as if Hubspot isn't able to solve a basic issue within 5 years then I fear for my data.
Please stop the contact creation when email from teambox received an email from others. It is very stupid function. We can add customer data by ourselves.
5 years on since raised and 15 pages in... any update on this? A critical issue for our business setup, we'll be leaving ServiceHub as soon as billing period is up due to this singular lack of control. Wouold prefer not to 😞
I really can't believe it was created this way in the first place. Who would want every email to create a contact at an individual address? Obviously you're going to fill your CRM with junk.
HubSpot, this is clearly a serious issue / pain point. Please listen to what people are saying and address this asap. It is not even that work-intensive of a change.
Note: The filtering/blocking suggestion only works if the spam consistently comes from the same domain.
In the current era spammers use entirely randomized domains, so every email is from a different address like ji2gh3hj@vb2j3h4jh.com
Or they use real domains that are spoofed or are from hacked companies (maybe we dont want to block every email from that domain if they are overall legitimate)
Or they use generic domains gmail/yahoo/hotmail etc, where we dont want to block legit support inquiries from those.
Following up on this in 2024 as this is still a major issue, and I am hoping it will get fixed! Without an ability to filter on which contacts should or shouldn't be created in the conversations inbox, we are having to create a filtered list of contacts we didn't want to be created, and then regularly go in and delete large volumes of contacts to keep our Hubspot data clean. We almost decided not to use the conversations inbox due to the lack of this feature. Ultimately, we had no choice but to find a work around to be able to track our emails. Please let us know if you have an update on this soon, thanks!
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