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
Flora
HubSpot Product Team

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

Saper
Contributor

@Flora I have to say it is very disappointing to hear that this functionality is developed in this way and for the plug-in. It shows that you haven't really captured the essence of the customer/user issue here.

 

This CCed enail issue is more of a SalesOps and sales management issue and needs to be approached accordingly. In other words, the platform should let us filter out those emails or prevent anyone creating those at all. Otherwise we just need to beg the sales reps to remember to do this–which they shouldn't be concerned with. 

I had a call with a member of your CX team last month and I'll repeat what I told her: I'm honestly having a huge difficulty in understanding why such simple yet crucial requirements turn into unresolved issues. 

p.s. if you would like to learn more about what I mean by my argument in greater detail, I'm always available for a conversation. 

JasonAtWineman
Participant

Flora,


Unless I'm missing something, you may be replying to the wrong idea. 🙂

 

The problem here is that people CC'd on emails are automatically created as new contacts.


The solution you mentioned appears to be a plug-in for Chrome that allows logging and tracking emails to a contact record (sort of the opposite of what we need).

 

It has been a few years so it would be nice to hear something from HubSpot on this.


More specifically, if:

1. we send an email to a client, then

2. they reply back and CC their colleagues

... we have no way to reply all to the thread and log the email to HubSpot without creating the colleagues as new contacts.

 

One idea is to not auto-create contacts who have been CC'd, or at least make that an option.

 

Thank you for your interest here. Could you knock that out real quick for us? 🙂

ck2018
Participant

If you're open to using an app from the marketplace as a workaround, Insycle can to delete contacts created by the Gmail/Outlook extension automatically.

 

Steps to set it up:

  1. In HubSpot, open an existing workflow, or create a new one with a simple "create date is known" trigger.
  2. Add new action and pick "Insycle" from "Available actions" tab or "Connect an app" if you don't have Insycle installed.
  3. Pick the Recipe "Delete Contacts created by Gmail/Outlook integration", save and activate.

Now when a contact is created from the Gmail/Outlook integration, it would be deleted automatically by Insycle. You can add this step to a nurturing workflow before the step that sends an email to avoid GDPR violations. Audit trail is available in the Insycle app for download at any time.

 

While you're there you can pick other Insycle Recipes to apply. For example, format the contact name in proper case to improve personalization on email: "Hello JANE" => "Hello Jane", remove spam contacts, internal contacts, or remove duplicate contacts. See the help article for more details: Integrate Insycle with HubSpot Workflows

 

For deleteing existing contacts created by the Gmail/Outlook extension, you can use the Insycle app "Group & Update" module to review contacts grouped by the "Original Source Drill-Down 1" property. It would show the various contact sources (Facebook, LinkedIn, Extensions, etc.) and the count of each source type. Then, you can click to bulk delete all contacts created by "EXTENSION" - that's the Gmail/Outlook integration source type.

 

I'm with Insycle, a Premier HubSpot App Marketplace tools that helps automating CRM data maintenance.

 

Screenshot: HubSpot Workflow Builder with Insycle action

 

ck2018_0-1612458647137.png

 

 

 

GeorgieL
Participant

I have read through the links but this doesn't solve the issue that my team is having with contacts PA ending up in HubSpot because the contact has CCd them into an email. 

The status of the origianal query is not Delivered. 

Please develop this function, it is really annoying to have to find and delete useless CCd contacts. 

Oliver75
Contributor

Hello everyone,

 

We do have the same problem. A lot of contacts are created due to the Cc function of Outlook or the HubSpot sales add-on for Outlook. We would like to prevent that from happening. At least every team member should have the choice if his Cc'd contacts are going to be created in HubSpot or not.

 

Just for clarification: We don't use Gmail.

 

So this should be available to all Outlook users, not only the ones who use the combination of Gmail and Chrome.

 

Best regards,
Oliver

DannyH
Contributor

Hi All,

 

We have the same issue. We are a small company so any contamination of our leads have a big impact. Needless to say we need to be on the lookout for crossing our contact tiers/plans. So we would really like an option to just uncheck the "create contact from cc/bcc email" in HubSpot itself. 

 

Not making workflows, using other apps or extensions. Just a simple function. 

 

Unfortunately, small fixes like this are never adressed. Instead it seems like HubSpot is transforming in some new form of Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.

AMShaw
Participant | Diamond Partner

@Flora Could we have a response to the message from @jasonatwineman above please?  This issue is causing GDPR non-compliance for some clients and needs to be resolved.  You appear to have marked it as closed without resolving it.

 

Many thanks!

  

AMShaw_0-1660232202726.png

 

LMitch
Contributor

Recommended to this thread from here.

My reponse there:

 

We do not use Chrome. The supplied link this feature doesn't solve my issue. A 'delivered' solution for a service our firm doesn't use does not help.

 

The feature request is:
GLOBAL setting by Admin/Super-Admin to avoid new contact creation from the CC field of ANY email. (regardless of the sender or application used)

 

TYVM.

 

Why HS isn't doing something for one of the biggest business tools (Outlook) is beyond me. And yes, this -does- affect our domain's gdpr and ranking (some have already greylisted our domain).

GLovering
Participant

We have issues were all contacts in a cc chain are added without requirement. the housekeeping to keep on top of these contacts is a full time job and really frustrating. 

 

Hubspot... when can we exclude these or at least allow us to filter the activity by Mail 'TO' or 'CC' 

GLovering
Participant

@Flora it looks like you have marked this issue as delivered but in fact you have a created a feature for add ons that partially works but not fixed the root issue within the CRM. 

Please advise if this is something Hubspot will actually develop. A simple 'data source' paramter for contacts added through a cc would suffice.