Prevent CC'd email addresses from being created as contacts
I'm not sure whether others find this as frustrating (or even know that it happens!) but we regularly find in our own portal and with clients that if you send a sales email using the Outlook or Gmail integration, 'log to CRM' and CC someone who is not a contact in HubSpot, they get created as a contact without you knowing.
I assume this is part of an automatic feature which would help you out in a situation where you're emailing a contact who doesn't exist in HubSpot.
My issue is that this is not good when you have CC'd an external supplier / partner or even other members of your clients team who need to be involved on a CC loop but are not a contact. Your client may have even emailed a group of people on a subject and you are simply replying.
Why is that an issue?
A) the number of contacts rises (and could impact your paid contact tiers) and there is no notification of which contacts have been added by accident this way - we have had to create a very confusing list to filter these people but I still worry some get missed.
B) They are automatically also in the marketing side of HubSpot, which is generally a good feature, but in this case difficult to manage.
With GDPR coming into effect soon I hope this is a feature which can be looked at to stop this happening or even to provide a manual check (even a tick box to say 'add these new contacts to the CRM?' so that there is a prompt to then go and mark them as not opted in).
This needs to end fast, please hubspot. Our CRM is a complete mess with literally hundreds of new contacts being added monthly with NO info except for an email address. This is garbage.
It was just shown to me that for each email I send, in the upper right corner there are ck boxes. I have the sales connector for Outlook desktop. Whenever I open a new email to someone or to no one yet, I have a box on the toolbar that has a host of choices. Track the email, create a contact and then when I click on the bottom right corner it opens up to even more choices. Is this what you mean? Today is my first day using it and I sent an email without realzing that perhaps a contact was created but when I looked in my CRM there wasn't one created altho it had the HS email in the bcc line.
Also, what I wrote may be wrong. I didn't quite understand the issue. My thing was not logging the entire email. Now I get it. I send an email to 'Steve' who IS a contact and for whom I DO want to log this email, but I don't want everyone on the CC list to get created. So I have to ck yes to log this email and then everyone gets created. Yes, that does seem to be not only a violation but also a huge pain. I just got help from Chat and asked them about that but they never answered it (but admittedly it was a side issue to my main question.) So is there no answer then? It's all or nothing?
OK, I have a workaround but needs to be used carefully. First off, let me say I am using the Outlook for Desktop connection just in case it's dif for 365 or whatever.
So in the upper right of my toolbar I have a few options. I can have it default to log or not log. I can have it default to track or not track.
Now, here's the more interesting part. If I click the bottom right corner of that Toolbar group it opens up a more advanced dialogue box. So if I do a Cntl C copy of everything in my cc field, then click on the spot on the bottom right corner of the Toolbar Hubspot Group to open the more advanced window, I can paste in all the contents of the cc field into a box that says "never log the following addresses" so I can prevent the cc contents from getting created in the CRM.
Like I said, it's a work around. I agree HS should let us just switch off all logging of the cc's.
The reason I said this must be done carefully, if you ever DO want to start logging to one of these, you must remember that you may have prevented it in the past. So if you email Steve who is your important contact, and prevented Dave in a past email who was a cc and then Dave becomes a potential customer, you need to go back and take Dave out of the prevention list.
But, at least there is a way to NOT log any of the cc'd people. Why HS has not come onto this forum and shared this makes me insecure about it being a solution. I hope someone here confirms this with me so I know for sure I have this correct.
I am just adding my voice as well. I find it unethical of Hubspot to not solve this problem because this seems like they want to artificially increase the contact databases size and consequently the cost for the client to maintain it. Moreover, we heavily rely on the system to help us remain GDPR compliant and reduce the effort to do so through automation. If our sales executives have to spend 60% of their time cleaning up data our company will suffer the consequences.
Hubspot, fix this problem - this is not rocket science and you are creating risks and unnecessary costs for your clients! All you need to do is differentiate between TO and CC contacts (Drill-down-source 2) for workflow and list filtering, and integrate a simple switch on the plug-ins to exclude CC contacts from being logged. This should take no less than a day or two to develop!
Here's what I found out. At the 'major competitor' the default is to NOT create contacts unless requested. So there's some sort of check box or prompt to create for each address that is not already a contact.
Here, it's the opposite. The default is to create unless requested not to.
Now, as I stated before the fastest workaround is not to create and then go delete but at least when I tried this using Outlook (haven't tried within HS directly) I can go to the toolbar, click on the bottom right corner of the HS group on the Outlook toolbar and it opens a more advance dialogue box were I can paste the email addresses that I copied from the cc or to fields in the box title 'never create contacts for these people'.
Unfortunately, the next time you go to email, you can't really remember if you already said no to the add'l email addresses or not and if you do want to create a contact in the future, you would have to take them out of that list where you nixed them.
Of course it would be best if the default were no. I think I'm loathe to assume it was some evil agenda to boost pricing. They probably just felt it more prudent for sales to grab everyone than to miss out on someone. However, the competition does the reverse. Seems like the way to go.
Can we get a response from a HubSpot rep on this please as this is a major drawback that will add to the growing list that we need to resolve with a new supplier.
This is ABSOLUTELY necessary. The lack of ability to turn off this automatic creation of contacts creates multiple issues in CRM and makes it nearly impossible to keep a clean database. Please implement this ability ASAP.
I just realized this is happening. Has there been a solution? It makes no sense to have people in CC or BCC adeed as contacts. I am sure some people or businesses will find it useful so having the option to decide if you want CC/BCC to be added as contacts or not would be great.
I've talked to HubSpot a few times about this issue and have brought up GDPR.
While I'm not sure how is it legal to collect and broadcast to European email adddresses where the recipient didn't specifically approve, HubSpot acknowledged my concern but dismissed it (the customer service agent spoke to someone internally but either didn't get or couldn't provide a lot of feedback). Maybe it's legal?
