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!
Does anyone know what the filters were from the original post?
I have another use case for NOT wanting to have contacts automatically created via ingoing/outgoing emails. I sometimes email referees for a Candidate from the contact via a template and this creates a new contact for the referee when it goes out, or when they reply.
This would be less of an issue if the amount of contacts didn't directly link to the cost of the CRM.
EDIT: Honestly guys, even just allowing us to add a wildcard for the incoming/outgoing conversions would fix this and buy you some time to fix the GUI to add the options/code something better.
This sounds like a slightly different use case than what others have suggested, but disabling automatic creation of contacts who email in to a conversations inbox would be such a critical feature for us because we often have employees write in to our support inbox who then get added automatically as contacts to tickets and deals. This creates all sorts of problems for us in how we manage and track communication, and with what emails get logged within the CRM.
I agree with what everyone else has said, in that having more control over how contacts get added to the CRM in general would be a huge benefit. In the specific use case I'm talking about, I'd love to have the ability to restrict creation of contacts when employees email in to the conversations inbox.
As an update I have been in contact with HS support, they have a division leader who is looking into this but have indicated that a fix will take time. And that this manager will post on this forum for an update, we are yet to hear anything in over 2 weeks, not really a good sign.
Obviously HS has a program of work they operate under, they have to plan fixes and changes as part of a broader strategy, the urgency of this change is dictated by a priority system that I am sure is determined by many things. A signifcant aspect will be the level of customer satisfaction/disatisfaction.
Therefore I can only encourage all persons who may be seeing this thread to post here and motivate for this change as many of you have already.
This is a key fix needed urgently as it is basically preventing us from using Hubspot tickets at the moment due to the massive amounts of contacts being created from having multiple shared "info" boxes connected to Conversations.
It's been a known issue for a couple of years and I do hope you can provide a fix rather quick now.
Shared inboxes, in the real world, tend to be public email addresses, the sort you put on your website so that people can contact you. Over time, spammers harvest these addresses and every day you get more spam than useful email. With the default HubSpot behaviour, each spam email means three actions - mark the email as spam, go to contacts and delete the contact and go to companies and delete the company. Obviously, this is an unnecessary waste of time.
All that is needed to fix this is one single flag in the shared inbox setup that stops mails to that shared inbox creating contacts and companies.
@cdewey22 We have a similar problem using a shared inbox for our info@ email address. In our case, all addresses that come though this are being created as Contacts even though many are from spammers just trying to sell us things. I think this mainly maps to your use-case #1, but we don't want to me paying for these contacts either...
Agree that this is a problem. It's a problem because it automatically creates unnecessary clutter in the CRM, it requires time from our team to remedy, and it creates some financial urgency because Hubspot bills for extra contacts.
It's exploitative to bill based on # of contacts, and not provide autonomy to customers as to how their contacts are created and managed.
I just wanted to say "hear! hear!" to @grafton's comment above:
"It's exploitative to bill based on # of contacts, and not provide autonomy to customers as to how their contacts are created and managed."
My reason for wanting to disable automatic contact creation is to avoid having employees/users created as contacts when they write in to our shared inboxes, but we would absolutely benefit financially from this, as well, and it's obvious HubSpot is incentivized *not* to address this issue due to the billing structure.
I have invested quite considerable time in motivating this change to HS directly, the last post by them indicates that they are working on this
BUT
I sense that they dont quite get the level of fustration this is causing to their customers that is me and you so please can the community weigh in here, comment on this thread and motivate for the change.
I also sense that they believe that this issue is limited to team inboxes ! Personally I think this is as big an issue as personal emails linked to HS which are creating new contacts especially when one does a reply to all on a mail from a contact (then these contacts are also added), therefore please share your experience in duplications too !!!
I'm quite new to HS, but the first thing I noticed is the incredible amount of useless contacts that are being created even from spammers or others who will never be involved in a pipeline therefore don't need to stay in the CRM
Please introduce a rule to manage which contacts must be logged and which needn't.
As a general update it appears as if this has been fixed but I do need input from all followers of this thread. I am in regular communciation with HS support on this issue and they assure me it has been sorted according to the following:
-Only for personal email inboxes that are connected to HS, I cannot vouch for shared inboxes as it appears as if they are excluded from this functio
-Where you log into (in my case) gmail and under the HS settings you remove the addition of logging/tracking for <new contacts>
Apparently this includes casese where you cc or reply all to emails
@Millerd I'm not sure I understand what exactly should be working or how to configure HubSpot based on your latest post.
Are you saying that contacts now won't be auto-created when emails are sent to/from a personal inbox that is connected to HubSpot? But that they will still be created when emails are sent to/from a shared inbox?
And where in the HubSpot settings do you disable logging/tracking for <new contacts>? Is this in the individual user's configuration of the email extension?
In any case, if this has only been fixed for individual email addresses and not shared inboxes, it doesn't really address the problem commenters here are having, which is that sending an email to a conversations inbox like "support@mycompanyname.com" or "info@mycompanyname.com" always creates a contact and we have no control over when and how those contacts get created.
The setting are imbedded in the gmail plugin settings under tracking. This may well be a beta feature so I would simply ping the support use the chat function in Hubspot and ask them to enable for you. When you have this simply deselect the "new contact" option in these settings.
As indicated this is for personal mail only, perhaps take up enabling this for a shared inbox, not quite sure why it would not apply to both.
Duncan
PS I suggest other participants to the thread also try this to see if it works
I just created a new chat support on our website. But I don't want to have any of the contacts from this chat in my Hubspot file. It's a real mess if my prospects and the others mix. You should be able to select a copy of the YES or NO file or with a filter.
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