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!
@EricHirsh I just came across this thread when dealing with unwanted contacts that were created after we connected a shared inbox to Conversations. I think we're mostly case #2 in the question you asked: The shared inbox I connected might receive emails that are leads and I would want to convert to contacts, but many other emails that we receive at the inbox are not leads at all, but sometimes something that we need to do relating to an existing contact.
As an example I'm looking at right now, we might work with one of our customers and eventually ask them to fill out a financing application. When they do fill out the application, this shared inbox receives a notification that the applicaiton was filled out. Ideally, I would love to log that email against the contact that filled out the application to note that they've filled out their application, but I don't see any way to do that as the email came from the finance application SAAS system, not from the customer.
But beyond that, we just get a lot of correspondance at the email address that we list publicly on the website, a lot of which might be spam or sometimes not spam but unrelated to sales, but sometimes is customers. I'd love to be able to just dismiss most of the emails that come in as not actionable, but optionally create a contact from an email if it is a lead, or to log emails on existing contacts if it is something operational related to a particular customer.
We're new to HubSpot, so working hrough multiple problems and solutions.
We have a Sales and a Service Team Inbox.
My first alert to this issue was that we get emails to our Service Inbox coming in as a Lead in the Prospecting Workspace, which was odd for our team.
We're a small team so we're kind of accepting some of these as useful. For example a few have been an existing customer who is emailing from a different email for a service/support. This does identify when a customer is suddenly using a new email and we can merge the contact. We've added some specific reasons to the Disqualification so we can hopefully exclude from the Sales Team's goals. But ideally these shouldn't be in the Prospecting Workspace. But we wold want to identify these and we do want an easy way to manage these requests within HubSpot.
We are working through how to better use our Team Inbox emails and are even thinking of a new Support Team Inbox to replace the Service Inbox as that particular email has been used for years and is possibly too bloated and complex for the purpose.
We love having the email/call/sms etc activity in the Contact/Deal/Ticket views. Wouldn't want to remove the sync - so helpful for all the teams.
We've only been using HubSpot for just over a week now, so I don't have any great ideas on how we'd like it to work. But perhaps it will always end up being more manual than we'd like, but would be good to make the process of selecting what you want to do with a contact very easy.
I'll add to my comments if we come up with any ideas / challenges in the next weeks
As a development engineer I have some sympathy for the HubSpot team, but this thread started in 2018 so that well has run dry.
We are a recent user of HubSpot and we only want to add pre-qualified contacts to our sales contact list.
These contacts are segmented and tagged as marketing contact for email campaigns, very simple and works well.
We want all email replies to the marketing campaign to be automatically recorded against the HubSpot sales contact.
If we use the Outlook Email client the user has to register an email reply to Hub-Spot manually from the Outlook 365 Email extension.
If this user is out of office then the reply is not registered in HubSpot until their return, which is unacceptable.
A solution is to create an Inbox channel and add the users here, then all inbound email from sales contacts is recorded against the sales contact in HubSpot, this works.
However, we do not want all emails hitting the channel users inbox from creating new HubSpot sales Contacts.
This is important as users may receive spam emails or more importantly private emails.
No one wants to find that thier GP has sent a private email and they are now a proud HubSpot sales contact and viewable by the whole organisation.
Spam is just a annoyance however private emails are far more serious for the user and for HubSpot, distributing private data breaks the law and will result in legal action.
Unless I am missing a setup option, I cannot see a method of preventing an Inbox Channel from automatically creating HubSpot Sales contacts.
If this case I am not sure how HubSpot has not addresed this problem.
The least the user could expect to see is the new contact created by the channel marked as "unqualified" and quarantined to an adjudicator.
I think that the set up options on the channel should be.
1) Default: Never create a sales contact automatically from a channel.
2) Option: Create sales contacts automatically for new email addresses.
3) Option: Create Sales contacts automatically for new email addresses where the email extension matches an exisitng company.
3) Option: Quarantine all automatically created sales contacts.
No Channel Option
A change that may solve many users problems is to add a hybrid option for those who have connected inboxes but are not using inbox channels.
An email option in general settings that says "Register all inbound emails for connected users where a Sales contact exists in HubSpot"
This would give the user confidence that inbound emails are being automatically registerd, but without the need to set up a channel and be swamped by emails creating unwanted contacts.
If you look futher up in the stream one user suggests that the issue is related to revenue, more contacts = more revenue.
If this is the driver for not adding the conact creation control then Hubspot is missing a trick.
The controls could be added as a chargeable feature, basic level+.
I am sure that there are many users who are managing hundreds spam emails who would pay $10 per month to automate the clean up (and protect their GDPR)
@TimDrew Yeah that was me. After my post they finally reacted. But as for all basic feature requests, nothing happens. Most of them are years old. I really liked you post and your option 3 suggestion.
@TimDrew Yes, that option 3! We have already entered all target companies as leads and are trying to find contacts and convert them. If these leads were to email, it would be nice if they were created directly as a contact and linked directly to the existing company. But the current way it only causes annoyance. So yes, there will have to be different options for different types of users. I can only imagine that option 3 won't work for your situation.
Just facing this issue now and found that this has been an ongoing discussion.
In response to @EricHirshAnd 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?
Currently our conversations are being used for our support inbox, and many support emails are from a user of our platform that has a simple one-time question, and there will most likely be no need to ever contact them again. So it's just a matter of a contact, and sometimes company, being created that is of no value to us.
Targeting marketing is the way forward, there is too much data in the market place to use a scatter gun method. For SME's trading B2B, collecting unvetted contacts from email streams is pointless and counter productive. Talking to other users many of them re-searching other platforms so they are not forced to manage the unwanted contact build up and the GDPR impact.
We develop all our own Data base and web facing software, never really had a problem toggeling a module off, or adding a filter.
I am not sure what is motivating HubSpot not to make this feature optional or as we discussed to filter or quarantine the content.
I guess that it comes down to desire or programming resources.
I'm joining in to shed some light on use cases where not having this is making Hubspot something we will have to move away from as a company.
I own a busy travel agency, we get leads that would be "deals" from many sources - web, returning clients, forms, social media etc.
Your comment:
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.
When using a shared team inbox to distribute leads, we also have returning clients who come directly to our own inbox - the problem is then connecting our business inbox to the teams - which we don't want to have 2 inboxes and extra pipelines. We have 1,000's of emails from suppliers, booking confirmations, changes, invoicing, support and back office. Being the owner, I also have all the business emails which is a volume far greater than sales/deals.
Client emails and contacts, perfect. However, bookings for the clients (many different sources) need to be sent to track under that client's deal. If I label a contact - Air Canada Vacations booking, Celebrity Cruise etc - but it is for one particular client, if I forward to that deal - I can't forward any others to their deals. Because the contact is now logged to one client.
The only workaround is if there would be a toggle to say "Do not log contact AND emails". Otherwise, I could get 20 Celebrity Cruise bookings come in, and any automation with forward ALL of them to every client who has booked one.
Not having the option is making HubSpot extremely manual and a lot of double entry. Having to save files, and then upload them to work around this. instead of being able to forward to the correct deal.
I'm hoping there is a workaround shortly, or sadly we'll have to move to multiple service options again as it can't be configured here.
Hi I think I understand your problem. It really it needs flow charting to be certain of the logic. Just to be clear, the key field in a contact is the email address, in addition HubSpot has a data base key for each contact record in your account.
Are you saying that when an email arrives from say bookings@easyjet.com you want to assign this email to another customer account with a different email address.
So you toggle don't file emails on easyJet.com allowing you to quarantine and assign to another contact.