HubSpot Ideas

Babel_Gem

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).

HubSpot Updates
Delivered
February 03, 2021 02:46 PM

Hello,

 

Thank you everyone for your help and feedback during the product development process.

 

This functionality is now live to all Chrome Extension users and we have documentation on this here: 
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email-tracking/track-and-log-emails-with-the-hubspot-sales-chrome-exte...

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email-tracking/customize-your-hubspot-sales-chrome-extension-default-c...

 

Let m know if there are any other ongoing questions and feel free to reach me at flora@hubspot.com

 

Best,

Flora

January 04, 2021 07:35 AM

@Saper 

 

To get to this menu, click the orange sprocket in the upper right corner for Gmail. From there, select "Log and Track settings". Let me know if you still don't see this option and I'd be happy to chat over email at flora@hubspot.com

In Beta
July 13, 2020 12:39 PM

Hi everyone,

 

Flora here again! I hope everyone is as well as they can be. We have implemented a setting to allow you to refine which objects should be associated when you are logging an email. 

 

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If you are intrested in being in the beta for this, please fill out this form.

In addition, I'd love to chat with any users about their experience around this- feel free to book here

 

Best,

Flora

Being Reviewed
May 07, 2020 02:47 PM

Hi everyone,


I'm Flora, the Product Manager for HubSpot's Sales Extensions.


Thank you all for taking the time to submit, upvote, and comment on this Idea- I know this has been persisting for awhile. We hear you loud and clear, and we agree that this functionality is important.


We are currently evaluating what the best solution to this issue is and we will update this thread. We've recently released a beta for email association which gives users better control of which record an email logs onto as well as a setting that allows you to disable deal association. If you are interested in this beta, please fill out this form here: https://forms.gle/sk196WJ8iFiEBwaw8

 

In the meantime, we are evaluating a more comprehensive solution to making log more consistent. 


Best,
Flora

91 Replies
beckyschaen
Participant

Our sales team has expressed this complaint on numerous occasions as well.

jhporte
Participant

This is a problem for us as well..... and there should be a way to limit this. However, since Hubspot charges for every contact you add, I suspect limiting ways of creating contacts is not something they will put a high priority on...  

 

I hope that is not the case here!

jeremyohara
Participant

I agree.. tracking how many contacts were added for a particular month is completely worthless if one contact CC's 19 people in their company.

 

There needs to be an option to not add contacts that are CC'd to an email. 1. For simplicity but 2. for transparency on HubSpot's part. Emailing with hundreds of new contacts a month adds up but if each those eventually CC one or two people and we pay per 1,000 contacts for marketing software then those numbers inflate very quickly with no added value.

DaveJoRo
Participant

Please Hubspot, take action on this item. This causes severe contact bloat in our CRM of unnecesarry contacts.

norbertoyoan
Participant

This is frustrating for us too, and it is also a privacy problem.

Sometimes private conversations that are completely out of a sell get into de crm with all the mail content.

 

Hubspot support team told me that if I write from a mail with the same domain of the destinatary it will not be logged but this feature doenst work to me.

 

I hope this problem to be solved quickly!

BrandonHIT
Member

This would be an enormous help to keep our pipeline free of clutter if this option could be toggled on and off. We are not able to use the CRM to its full capacity due to this issue.

Sabrina_LAC
Member

totally agree. We definately need this too to have our contacts under control. Thanks Hubspot!!! 🙂

DXMarketing
Participant

Has there been any progress on this front?

norbertoyoan
Participant

I'm thinking to stop using hubspot because of this among other issues (for example: if I click a mail read notification of Chrome it directs me to Inbox. Completely useless).

Alexberthou
Member

I totally agree. Both frustrating and confusing for our sales and marketing teams. 

mitchellpowers
Member

This needs to be changed. 

 

I'm personally very tempted to go to Salesforce as this limitation should be in place. If you want to accurately track source's of all your contacts and yet 40% are added because your contact cc'd colleagues then really I shouldn't expect my team to go into each and everyone of those contacts and add source. 


SteveF
Member

We have the same problem - why the system would want to add internal email addresses is beyond me!

KateH
Contributor

We are having big problems with this too - from Dec 1-22 over 100 contacts were created like this and I have to go through and delete the ones that shouldn't be in the system.

 

Hubspot - Please look into this and come up with a solution.

Siddall
Top Contributor

Yes, this makes it difficult to track REAL contacts who are slipping through the cracks vs contacts like "accounting@widget.com" and the like that get created when the sales team emails a customer about an invoice.

 

 

Siddall

amandabrunish
Contributor

Agree.  Really throws off our system. 

michaelkay160
Member

Agreed. This make it impossible to segment properly and fills our contacts with emails that shouldn't be contacts.

AndyBauer
Participant

This definitely needs to be addressed. Email tracking and contact creation should be two seperate and independent options, rather than a all or nothing function! 

JasonAtWineman
Participant

Is anyone at HubSpot reading this?

 

Very disappointed to see that auto-create-CC'd-contacts cannot be deactivated.

 

Auto-creating contacts mangles reporting for contacts *and* companies since HubSpot also auto-creates companies for the contacts it auto-creates.  This is additionally throwing off the sync to our external CRM (we end up with extraneous company names, which confuses sellers when adding actual contacts) because in CRM, company names are defined by site:  "Company - Site".

 

When there are multiple sites, those sites of course share a web domain.  I'm guessing here, but it appears that when HubSpot tries to auto-assign a contact to a company, and sees multiple web domains, it auto-creates a generic "Company" entry as well (which doesn't match how we name companies).

KateH
Contributor

HubSpot - this really is becoming an issue - it should be a top of the list fix.

The other kick back here is that all these contacts are being added as 'Leads'!  this messes up our reporting too on the number of new leads we are generating.

amandabrunish
Contributor

I would appreciate some sort of response from a HubSpot rep.  I believe I requested this on another feed on this topic.  I have to imagine that with GDPR upcoming, this will be even more of an issue.