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

354 Replies
JaakkoJ
Participant

Please Hubspot do something about this. 

 

We handle the support tickets of our users in the ticket pipelines and now we have no way to block contact generation.

 

So now we have to delete manually hundreds of contacts taking place in our CRM who are not interest of us to have in the database.

 

 

Lilliput00
Participant

HubSpot please pick this idea up for review: it renders an otherwise very useful add-in into a monstrosity that adds chaos and clutter to the database. The suggested functionality is essential for Conversations but also for emails sent from Outlook (or other email clients) - the amount of new contacts created per month indiscriminately is hovering around 1k per month.... Often empty contacts with just a name and email address. It adds so much friction when trying to keep the database clean and relevant. I know you have a million priorities but this is critical, given how, amongst other things, number of contacts held in CRM counts towards pricing plans etc... 

rlundin
Member | Partner

Has there been any progress made on this? It is necessary to keep a database clean and clear of clutter. No update in a year...

BMike
Member

Any update on this?

SOrchard
Member

We decided to connect our Inbox this week, and had to disable it within a few days because of all of the spam contacts it was creating. It's totally unusable for us until Hubspot release an update that allows you to configure this.

DStoppler
Member

Can we please get an update on this?

GLeigh
Participant

How can this be a problem that has beeen left unresolved for so long?  This thread goes back to 2018.  Surely the fix is to only store conversations (and hence by default new contacts) when the contact already exists in HubSpot?  This is such a big issue that needs addressing yesterday 🙂  Come on HubSpot get your act together!

marshah
Contributor

This is NEVER going to get fixed!!

SteveFarina
Participant

The current setup is tedious and I can't imagine a single user that would want every single email and contact logged in HubSpot. That's insane. 

I think you (HubSpot) are overcomplicating the UI on this. For now, why not just create an option (checkbox) to disable ALL emails and contacts from automatically pushing to HubSpot. Then, within the extension, create checkboxes and/or buttons that allow users to add specific conversation threads and contacts to HubSpot. 

 

That would enable those of us who only want to see the most highly relevant data in our CRM. 

 

Note: Salesforce does this. 

SteveFarina
Participant

.

SteveFarina
Participant

HubSpot: Here's how Salesforce does it with their "Inbox" extension in GMail. 

Note the following: 
1. The "Create Contact" Button: This gives the user the OPTION to add the contact to Salesforce. 

2. The "Log to Salesforce" Cloud: This gives the user the OPTION to add an incoming email to Salesforce. 

This allows users to send only the data pertinent to their sales cycles to their CRM, and assigns threads to appropriate contacts, opportunities, etc. 

 

What prevents you from enabling the same? Salesforce Inbox Screenshot.png

ahartline
Member

It is next to impossible to segment our contacts to send targeted content when our contact data is so incomplete due to contacts being auto-created. When we add contacts to our system, there are a number of required properties (eg. job function, region, industry, etc.), auto-created contacts do not have any of this information. The example above of how Salesforce does it is exactly what I envioned to be a great solution for this issue - a pop- up notifies us in the email exension whether or not the contact is in the CRM, then we have the choice on how to proceed.

GLeigh
Participant

@SteveFarina this looks like a great solution in Salesforce.  Let's hope the @hubspot team pick this up.  I recon it is costing my client about 50 hours/year just cleaning up useless contacts.  Needs solving this asap.

 

Appreciate the input on this thx

JStreit1
Member | Elite Partner

So many of my clients struggle with this frustrating setting. There needs to be a way for the sales reps to decide whether or not a contact should be created from the Sales extension rather than the tool automatically creating contacts for them and creating spammy contacts in the CRM database.

SteveFarina
Participant

@ahartline @GLeigh - Thanks, and I'm glad you agree. 

I was a part of Salesforce's enterprise team for years. It's such a simple solution to a big problem with HubSpot. 

Feel free to connect with my any time at stevefarina.com

FMaher
Contributor

Is there any update on this? We are considering disconnecting our Inbox due to the amount of spam and consquent trash contacts that are created. Very frustrating.

MICEO
Member

Hey, are there any news on this issue? I cannot write a single email in my Gmail without HubSpot automatically creating a contact. Would love an option for that!

AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

Hi there @MICEO . The Gmail integration should solve your problem. There are the two check boxes on every email that you send - "Log" and "Track". You can uncheck those, and no more contact creation. And if those are by default checked and you want them unchecked (again, by default), at the top of the page, click the Hubspot icon > Log and track settings and uncheck there. All this is valid if I understood your issue correctly. The problem here is with the email that is connected to Hubspot's Inbox - that is the issue.

MICEO
Member
Thank you, that’s exactly what I needed!
AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

Glad I could help!