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.
Weitere Ideen mit folgender Beschriftung anzeigen:
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!
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!
Please can you communicate the key importance of this amendment
Whilst there have been some complex requests for amendment here I would like to ask that you start with the easiest, simply have a single option which allows the user to add new mail conversations to the DB, would involve a very simple lookup to the DB to see if the email exists if not then not to add it !
This issue has gone on way too long. Additionally, we've spoken with privacy attorneys and they advise us this creates significant legal exposure under laws like GDPR and California's CCPA. When our employees, by the simple act of sending an email, it creates legal exposure to us for processing data in a way not intended/expected by the receipient nor for a legitimate purpose. Hubspot may claim these people are giving consent or there's a legitimate purpose, but when these contacts are being automatically created by employees simply sending emails (including cc'ing to a group), there is real exposure for all of us that senders (or participants on a string) did not intend to have their contact info in Hubspot, and no legitimate purpose in automatically creating a record/dossier on someone just because they were on an email string with an employee of our companies.
Hubspot's unwillingness to offer a toggle to disable "auto-creation of accounts" creates significant exposure for all its customers, and the only possible reason for refusing to add this feature, is that Hubspot makes money off the number of contacts we have in the database, and auto-creation of accounts dramatically increases the contact count, costing us money and making Hubspot lots of money. Hubspot, please do the right thing and give us this feature.
All good point, can I encourage HS users to continue to post to this thread such that some "change log" process can be motivated to have this major issue resolved.
There is realy no good reason for this function to not be incorporated.
In addition any comment back from HS would be welcome !
You're both spot on here - this is something that has taken an unfortunately long time to address and the fact that it's directly tied to Hubspot's pricing structure makes it that much worse.
While I'm not holding my breath, @cdewey22 did chime in a few weeks ago to let us know that the team will be reviewing this internally and that they have a few upcoming features that will begin to address this.
I agree - keeping up the momentum on this thread is important because this is something that needs to be addressed.
I am also having the same issue of our own company contacts and spam being added into the CRM. I came here to upvote the idea and to state that it is tedioius to have to manually go in an delete these records daily so that it is not bogging down what the sales team is seeing.
Hope we have a solution to filter out our own company contact soon!
I tried to use this workaround for instapage notifications. However now it seems that the integration is not working properly anymore and submitted form contacts are not added to the list they are supposed to be added to.
You missed one key use case. For those companies interested in complying with GDPR and CCPA and avoiding significant legal risk, this issue creates significant exposure.
Email strings often have contacts who have in no way given consent to our company to process and store their data in our CRM, and when it's storage is done passively by an employee who forgets to uncheck the tracking box, there's an argument there was no intent to store and a risk of lack of legitimate purpose.
And beyond the legal exposure under privacy laws, it adds further exposure with employment law, HIPAA, and other laws when conversations with outside HR consultants, lawyers, etc. are automatically logged and visible to everyone...until someone remembers to uncheck the box or specifically block those email addresses and domains. That's a huge burden on all of us, and so far, it seems the only reason not to offer this feature is that it would lower the revenue Hubspot makes from all these contacts piling up in the database.
The feature is a simple toggle that disables "Automatic Contact Creation from Logged Emails."
@cdewey22 We just started our Hubspot account, and our problem is definitely more about the auto creating contacts. We have had 1 user using hubspot for 3 weeks, and it is already a huge problem for us.
It is startling that the company should be so unresponsive. I'm beginning to wonder if this idea section is really about providing platitudes rather than solutions. Or is this arrogance? Do you feel you are so secure that you can ignore the customer and only deploy solutions and enhancements that generate Hubspot more income?
Come on guys. You have a great product with a few major holes that are clear to anyone who uses the product for a short time. Own up to it and articulate a vision to your customers with what you are going to do about it. In the end, you want us to be advocates for your product. What better way to achieve that than by delighting us your current customer base.
Is there an update to this or a wildcard that I can add to the non-conversion list? The link in the solution isn't accessible to me? It's either been removed or I lack the permissions to see it.
No update as yet, however I did log a seperate HS support ticket and HS plans to provide formal response shortly. We are all in urgent need to have this fix created, hopefully more posts here will motivate this.
Sie müssen ein registrierter Benutzer sein, um hier einen Kommentar hinzuzufügen. Wenn Sie sich bereits registriert haben, melden Sie sich bitte an. Wenn Sie sich noch nicht registriert haben, führen Sie bitte eine Registrierung durch und melden Sie sich an.
.png "HubSpot Employee"){kind=icon}
