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. 

 

image.png

 

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
Siddall
Top Contributor

"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."

 

Yes, this really throws off our reporting as well.

 

 

"I have to imagine that with GDPR upcoming, this will be even more of an issue. "

 

^That^

 

 

DaveJoRo
Participant

Honestly Hubspot, I am shocked this is being ignored still, at almost a year later!

Emlyn
Member

When will hubspot take this problem into account.

This is a real problem in terms of privacy and confidentiality, and with the new GPDR regulation this is more than important.

Siddall
Top Contributor

GDPR VIOLATION?

Correct me if I'm wrong but adding a contact to HubSpot without their concent due to the current HubSpot CC functionality will not be complient with GDPR.  Smiley Sad

DXMarketing
Participant

Interesting point. We just went through the process of alerting customers about GDPR and how it affects Google Analytics even though the majority of users are not in Europe, there's still a risk associated with data collection if it could affect en EU resident.

Lea
Participant

I totally agree, this is confusing and pollute the Hubspot database 

OllyHuntsman
Participant

This is a total nightmare!!!!

 

Contacts are getting added to our database because we've either emailed them or opened an email from them which just don't belong there! Say for example if I emailed my mother or a staff member emailed their gynaecologist! These emails should not be logged if there is no contact already in Hubspot.

 

This has the potential for being an enormous GDPR infringement and needs to be rectified immediately.

 

If there was just a small popup saying "This email contact is not in Hubspot would you like to add them to the CRM ? YES/NO"

 

This would solve the issue immediately - Salesforce currently does this

 

Screenshot 2018-06-07 14.49.32.png

crisaba87
Participant

I vote for this Idea.

MeganReid
Participant

Hi Hubspot team, please consider making this feature more of an off/on situation where users can dictate whether the CC'd email becomes a contact or not. Doing this automatically creates bloat in our contacts and skews our monthly analytics. Please take action on this immediately. 

OllyHuntsman
Participant

This is a GDPR MELTDOWN Feature

amandabrunish
Contributor

^ That made me lol.

rickuz
Participant

I agree and just upvoted your question. There needs to be a way to exclude addresses in CC line on a message from being created as contacts. The only workarounds Hubspot support was able to provide was to not log the email, which defeats the whole purpose of logging, or putting the people you are copying in the BCC, which is not a good solution when you want others to know who else was copied on the message.  They pointed me to this forum to try to gain some traction with the development team. It seems like another on/off switch in the email extension that says "Log CC Addresses" would take care of it.  I would think most people would want the default to be set to OFF.  That could be a global setting that could be changed for those who want to log every CC. And there could be another tick box on the email send window with the same choice, so you could overide the global setting when sending an individual email. 

JasonAtWineman
Participant

Unfortunately, HubSpot is incentivized @ $50/mo. for each additional 1000 contacts we add.  So, going from 7000 contacts to 7001, for example, sends a user to the next tier.  One would think this small amount of money would not motivate HubSpot to support shady business practices like arbitrarily inflating contact lists, but they also wouldn't be financially motivated to change it (unless people started leaving the platform; which I'm not suggesting).

 

To summarize:  if a HubSpot user (one of us) sends an email to a contact and that contact replies and CC's 5 other people, we have a choice to make:  (1) reply-all, adding the 5 other folks (probably against their collective GDPR will) to our HubSpot contact list (likely adding noise) or (2) remove them from the thread, irritating the person who found it relevant to add them in the first place.

 

I wonder if HubSpot isn't having a hard time seeing the forest for the trees on this one.

tjgarland
Participant

Definately agree that a check box would be an elegant solution: add CC email contacts to HubSpot? YES / NO

Bradley_Hughes
Member

This is causing mayhem and havoc across our team of 25 currently. 

 

HubSpot absolutely needs an option in Settings to disable this Cc: logging function globally, either per user or for all users.

 

 Much user dismay over confidential emails they cc to addresses that they don't want to have logged or to be added as contacts, including their own personal addresses, with emails being logged and created as contacts, over and over again. 

 

We're constantly having to manually remove those unwanted logged emails from our contacts in the CRM.

 

The challenge is that sometimes we do want to email our personal addresses directly and have the emails logged, such as for testing templates to our own accounts.  So we can't just use blanket exclusion of those email addresses either.

 

So a tickbox to disable CC: logging per email would also be very useful.

 

Another crazy issue seems to be that putting our *.domain.com in as a block-all exclusion is *sometimes* not excluding emails CC'd to our internal addresses, but it's not consistent, happening occasionally to a few of our users.

 

matvej51
Participant

Joined the community just to comment on this. 

 

I would like adding a contact to be an intentional action - that way we can build it out with leads and minimal required data according to internal SOPs. 

 

Frankly I don't see the use case for automatic addition of CC's. At least not a use case that outweighs the need to manually delete a new contact (and sometimes a new company). 

 

Thanks!

StephThy
Participant | Elite Partner

This is an issue that literally dozens of my clients have run into. Please create this function!

Sue1
Member

Yes this can be very frustrating.

 

As a Company we get monitored on the people we create in Hubspot and if we have added the details correctly, it can get annoying when loads of people are being created that you don't need and are only on copy because your contact needs them to be.  

 

Please remove the CC section from Hubspot to help us save time on deleting people all the time.

vgaliana
Member

This is definetly a major pain point for the Marketing and Sales team on our end.

jjiln
Member

I second this very much - mails from my sales guys who are also the account managers can involve numerous other stakeholders, and it means that there are massive delays when trying to send a mail to a list because the sales guys have to cleanse every list for irrellevant CCd in contacts. If there was a way to segment a list excluding CC'd in contacts that would sort it but that doesn't exist. Please have some optional toggle to let us control the quality of contacts created rather than just adding everyone?

 

Thank you