Preventing Contact Emails To/From Support Inbox from Associating to Deals

[JHogan1]

Hi all,

We’re in the early stages of rolling out the Service side of HubSpot, and I’ve set up our Support email as a channel under Service → Help Desk.

Here’s the challenge we’re running into:

In our business, it's common for a single contact to have both:

• An open Support Ticket, and

• An active Sales Deal (e.g., they’re working with Sales to add licenses or upgrade products).

Because of this, any email thread with that contact from the Support Inbox — purely support-related  — is automatically being associated with the open Deal, cluttering the Deal timeline with irrelevant support communication.

I’ve already had our Support team go into their personal settings in the HubSpot Gmail extension to uncheck automatic Deal associations, but unfortunately, that hasn’t resolved the issue.

We’re also facing a bit of resistance from the Support team when it comes to changing their habits (e.g., double-checking associations before sending emails), so I’m really hoping for a more automated solution.

My question:
Is there a way to prevent any emails sent to or from our Support inbox from being automatically associated with Deals — without having to manually unassociate them every time?

Any workarounds, suggestions, or automation strategies would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @JHogan1,

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@JHogan1 wrote:

Is there a way to prevent any emails sent to or from our Support inbox from being automatically associated with Deals — without having to manually unassociate them every time?

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The only automatic options in this area can be found here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/object-settings/configure-automatic-activity-associations

You can define which records an activity should be associated to automatically depening on the source record of the activity.

Outside of that, however, everything is manual. HubSpot currently does not (yet?) have any features that look at the conctext of an email to then decide whether it should be linked to a ticket or deal or not.

If you want accuracy here and correct association to tickets and deals, this will require manual steps by the team. I don't see any ways around that, unfortunately.

If you don't want any incoming emails associated to deals, you could simply turn that off in the aforementioned settings.

Not associated incoming emails from conversations inboxes with deals is, as far as I know, not possible as the source record for the activity is considered the contact record. If you turn association to deals off for emails here, that would affect all emails logged to contacts.

Best regards

[JHogan1]

I appreciate you pointing that out. I am familiar with those settings but have a question. For Associated Deals it says:

"Associated Deals

Activities are logged only to open deals."

If that is set to "None" does it still log to all open Deals? Because I think that might be part of the problem... Because I have it set to None for every combination...

I figured it was going to be a manual issue that they need to be on top of.. I appreciate the response!