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!
This is a serious issue that was reported in 2018, and now it's 2021. I would ask why this hasn't been fixed, but the answer is obvious it's to increase HubSpot's revenue. I just started trying out this CRM a couple of days ago and found noticed this issue. It makes no sense that Hubspot has known for three years and done nothing. This is a huge red flag to me. Is there a plan to fix this or not, and when?
Is it also normal for HubSpot to promise an update in a few weeks and then ghost the topic for the next 8 months?
@dave-kimble Although the issue is a bit of a pain in the butt, I wouldn't consider it a deal-breaker. And, although it definitely bugs me, I wouldn't look to it as a signifier of some broader trend of Hubspot ignoring the community or doing zero product development. If you want to get a better idea of what Hubspot are actually working on, I'd start with their product update videos.
Any updates on this? We serve both our clients and their end-users, but do not want the end-users in our CRM, which currently makes it impossible for us to serve the end-users using our HubSpot tools.
I'd like to share a possible solution for you (Professional & Enterprise). HubSpot launched beta for conversational-workflows in December 2020.
This workflow may help you
Sign up for beta and get access to conversational-workflows. As soon as you get beta-access:
Create a contact property called "conversation-inbox date"
Create a conversation-workflow
Example Trigger: Inbox XY
Action: set contact property "conversation-inbox date" to date of the step
Create an active clean-up-list like with arguments like "conversation-inbox-date is known (or older than 10 days) AND no deal is associated with that contact
Yes, we have the same issue. We want to connect a team email that gets inquires from customers and others and creates tickets for them, but we don't want them all automatically added as contacts becasue some should not be in HubSpot. This is really dissapointing HS doesn't have something for this. It seems basic.
@cdewey22 Any chance you have an update on this? I saw the workflow that @sk0si suggested, which is okay. It is really painful to deal with this. Right now I have to manually review all the contacts created to make sure the ones being added are the ones that add value. I just don't want everyone in the marketing database. If I could alter the Lifecycles to mark some as vendors or partners that would also help, but HubSpot is really designed for marketing. So I'm stuck with a bunch of necessary contacts that I have to filter out. Thanks!!
like rensdckw we serve our clients and thier end users so dont want contacts to be automatically created from chats or tickets. As a software company ourselves I find it appauling this hasn't been addressed with a simple fix for OVER 2 YEARS, condering switching crm as this attitude doesn't sit well.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SOLVE THIS ISSUE!!!! Hubspot is creating contacts left and right and then they go into our system and cause CHAOS!!!!
Agree it's hugely annoying and time consuming (not to mention anxiety inducing when i see unwanted items in my beutifully organised contacts list!) to have to keep deleting contacts, especially if they are spam or have been previously deleted.
There should be a 'do you want to add ths contact to CRM' pop up or button or similar.
This is a big issue for us as our salesteams communicate throught emails to plenty of "cc contacts" that actually are not interesting for us to add in Hubspot. This causes multiples contacts creation that ruin our contacts visibility.
It would be great to add a fonctunality that allow us to not create contacts in Hubspot if they are in cc of email.
"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!"
This is indeed a pain, because it creates a cluttered database and causes us extra charges (contact tiers).
Both are frustrating.
The workaround (filtering out these contacts) is currently only possible one-by-one. Thsi si impossible when you have hundreds of such contacts.
Of course, they decide they may now have an update. We switched over to Infusionsoft a few days ago, for a few reasons, but this was the main thing that pushed us.
We have a similar issue. We want to use Outlook integration to send to and receive emails from leads. We don't want to manually check "track" or "log" each time we are sending an email, depending on whether the correspondent is a lead or not. So, we always want to have tracking and logging on, BUT we don't want new contacts to be created in CRM IF they don't exist. This is because many of our HubSpot users are not just in Sales and so they send a ton of emails to people other than leads. But, when they DO send emails to existing leads, we want HubSpot to automatically track and log. So, it's not enough to just blocklist our own company domain to block company confidential emails from being registered in HubSpot.
I'm hoping Hubspot can give us an update on this - our sales data is now a mess because of all the bad email addresses and company names that have been added to it. It is my single biggest issue with Hubspot.
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