Sending Email Notifications to a Connected Inbox

[RobNewton]

I have a team that works out of a connected outlook inbox to onboard new customers.

They onboard companies as a group, no single person owns any individual onboardings and they work exclusively out of the shared inbox, not their individual emails.

I'd like to push email notifications back to the inbox as onboardings progress. For example, when credit terms are established and the corresponding company attribute is updated, I'd like to push an email to the inbox, "Customer Name - Credit Terms Updated". They they know they can go into HubSpot for something.

I've currently tried a couple of different things including:
1. Creating the inbox as a contact, associating that contact with a special label, and enrolling the company in a workflow that sends an email to the associatd contact (which is really the inbox). This goes to spam since the inbox is both the sender and the recipient, also this is being flagged as sending from the marketing portal.

2. Enrolling a contact associated with the company as the "onboarding POC", enrolling that contact in a workflow and sending an email to the inbox (from some internal email/user), but that also goes to spam.

Any suggestions on how to send notifications to an inbox? I know the individual users on the team will get notifications in HubSpot, that's not what I'm looking for. I'm only looking for ways to send an email to an inbox and not have it go to spam.

The email doesn't get a TON of spam, I may just end up asking them to treat spam like a live folder.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @RobNewton,

Have you considered using internal email notifications in workflows and, instead of sending them to a single user, sending them to an entire team of HubSpot users? That would be the common way of doing this. While each recipient gets their own email, I would consider this best practice.

HubSpot is designed so that certain things are moved away from just working through emails - what you're trying to do goes a little bit against that design.

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@RobNewton wrote:

Enrolling a contact associated with the company as the "onboarding POC", enrolling that contact in a workflow and sending an email to the inbox (from some internal email/user), but that also goes to spam.

---

You can send an internal marketing email instead of an internal email notification. This lets you specify the sender (one of your own email addresses instead of HubSpot's notification address) which should bypass the spam filter. "Internal marketing email" are a separate workflow action in contact-based workflows only.

Best regards

[RobNewton]

Thanks @danmoyle , we don't use Slack but we do use Teams and I've thought about going that route. I like the idea of moving more of our "internal" messaging out of emails.

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hi @RobNewton. I think this is a built-in limitation/feature from what I've seen and what I can tell in some HubSpot Knowledge Base research. HubSpot deliberately treats workflow‑generated emails to a connected team inbox as spam, so your current approaches will always be brittle without changing the pattern (from a KB article here).
​

Here's what I've learned abotu this: HubSpot explicitly flags emails sent from your HubSpot account to your connected team email address as spam in the Conversations/Help Desk inbox. It also flags any workflow emails that create a new thread in that same shared inbox as spam, regardless of which “user” you pick as the sender. Creating the inbox as a contact and emailing it, or emailing it from an internal user, still counts as “emails sent from your HubSpot account,” so they’re routed to the Spam view by design. So you’re fighting a baked‑in rule: “don’t let HubSpot’s own automation pollute shared inboxes.”

Does your team use Slack? I've seen users take that route when the real need is “central visibility” more than “literal email in that same mailbox.” Here's that set up in case it's something you could do: Push notifications to Slack/Teams from HubSpot workflows, then use Slack/Teams → Email bridges or forwarding rules to drop a digest into the shared inbox if absolutely necessary. This moves the “primary” channel off email, which is closer to HubSpot’s design intent for internal ops workflows.

To expand a bit on what @karstenkoehler offered, if the only reason you connected the inbox to HubSpot is visibility, you can decouple notifications from that connection. 

Here's what that would look like, step by step. 

• Send internal marketing emails from a normal authenticated sender to a distribution list (e.g. onboarding-alerts@company.com) that is not set up as a HubSpot Conversations inbox.
• Let Exchange/Outlook rules fan those into whatever shared mailbox/folder structure you want.
• Because the address isn’t a Conversations inbox, HubSpot’s “team email spam” rules won’t apply; only your mail server’s spam logic does, which you can tune via allow‑listing, SPF/DKIM/DMARC alignment, etc.

​And here's what that gives you:

1. Regular workflow‑driven emails.
2. Central, shared visibility in Outlook.
3. No fighting HubSpot’s Conversations spam rules.

Hopefully one of those ideas helps. Happy HubSpotting, Rob!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @RobNewton,

Have you considered using internal email notifications in workflows and, instead of sending them to a single user, sending them to an entire team of HubSpot users? That would be the common way of doing this. While each recipient gets their own email, I would consider this best practice.

HubSpot is designed so that certain things are moved away from just working through emails - what you're trying to do goes a little bit against that design.

---

@RobNewton wrote:

Enrolling a contact associated with the company as the "onboarding POC", enrolling that contact in a workflow and sending an email to the inbox (from some internal email/user), but that also goes to spam.

---

You can send an internal marketing email instead of an internal email notification. This lets you specify the sender (one of your own email addresses instead of HubSpot's notification address) which should bypass the spam filter. "Internal marketing email" are a separate workflow action in contact-based workflows only.

Best regards

[RobNewton]

---

Have you considered using internal email notifications in workflows and, instead of sending them to a single user, sending them to an entire team of HubSpot users? That would be the common way of doing this. While each recipient gets their own email, I would consider this best practice.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I think I mentioned that the users don't look at their individual emails. They work out of the inbox. Sending individual users emails doesn't help (unless I end up creating a dummy user to send all emails through and then forward from that user to the inbox)

I hear you on going against the "design" and that's something I'm working with stakeholders on. There's a VERY strong inbox culture, the more inboxes the merrier! and I'm working to transition them to the idea of tickets representing the work that needs to be done.

Internal Marketing Email is sent to spam with the message, "This message was sent from marketing email from this portal".

Maybe we're bad at email here (I'm still working to convince people they don't have to CC themselves) but SO much email is being flagged as spam. It makes the inboxes pretty hard to use.

In this specific case though, I'm still just trying to send an email to an inbox rather than a user.

[STierney]

Hey @RobNewton - thanks so much for posting in the Community!

I'd like to tag in some Community experts to see if they have any insightful recommendations for us! @karstenkoehler, @Phil_Vallender, and @danmoyle - any thoughts on how it may be possible to send notifications to a shared inbox?

Shane, Senior Community Moderator