Disable automatic contact creation for Conversations
HubSpot auto creates a contact for anyone that emails in - or is cc'd into a reply in conversations. For some customers who manage through support, this will mean a large number of contacts can enter the database. The only way to prevent this at the moment is by setting filtering rules, as all filtered emails do not create contacts. There is a use case from a customer in this post [Hyperlink removed by moderator as it linked to an archived Community post with duplicate information]
This is a request to build a "Create contact" rule giving us the option to disable automtically creating contacts for people we communicate with in Conversations.
Without addressing every point in each of them, I too want to make a note about "Never Log" (which is distinct from Allow/Deny lists, and I know that confuses some customers). I appreciate you bringing it up. It's helpful to hear about the relationship between 'never log' and 'disable auto contact creation.'
I don't think there is a post in the Ideas forum about it, but in our internal tools for tracking customer support requests, the fact that the Conversations Inbox currently does not respect the CRM Never Log list is a top item. And, actually, it would be fair to call that "Being Reviewed" as well.
We can look into Inbox respsecting the Never Log list - open question about whether that should be admin configurable, or just, standard.
Similar to auto-contact-creation, the devil is in the backend details.
Thank you for continuing to upvote and comment on this Idea, even when there hasn’t been a HubSpot response for a long time. A long-running pain point deserves a thoughtful response, and we want to take the time to give one to you because you deserve it.
It might look like we haven’t been listening (and that is painful in and of itself), but we have been passively following and have now had enough preliminary discussions that I can move it into “Being Reviewed.” This does not mean we are building a solution right now or saying anything about ‘when’ but it does mean we are thinking carefully about implementation, and doing so in a way that solves more customer problems than it creates.
Some housekeeping, since the original issue was opened in 2018 and HubSpot looked very different then
I am interpreting this idea to be specifically about when customers connect team-monitored email addresses (such as for customer support) to the Conversations Inbox and also Help Desk, where, yes, it is currently the case that an email message from a new email address does automatically create a contact, and there are currently no settings to adjust or disable that.
I see comments about suggestions for, and workarounds with, our Gmail or Outlook extensions. The way that personal email addresses (e.g. for individual sales reps) connect to HubSpot is a different (but related) system, so any feedback you have about contacts, automatic creation, logging, never-logging, etc should be handled in separate Ideas posts than this one.
One of the main critiques in the comments is that HubSpot might be ignoring fixing this issue so that it can generate revenue by increasing the number of contacts in a customer’s account. This is not true. Since the last update to this Idea by a HubSpot product manager, HubSpot implemented that contracts are based off of the number of marketing contacts in an account.
Two important things to know about the Conversations Inbox
It does not automatically create contacts for email addresses from messages flagged by the system as Spam.
It does not create marketing contacts. At all. All of the contacts created by Inbox are “non-marketing” contacts.
This of course doesn’t lessen the pain for any of you that are struggling to manage messy CRM data.
It seems to me like there are at least two camps of frustrated customers here
Those whose team email addresses connected to the inbox are receiving an undue amount of spam, and for various, and possibly different reasons, our Spam system is not flagging them. Thus contacts are getting created.
Those who do want to receive and respond to all of the legitimate (non-spam) messages that come into their team email address in Inbox, but for some (and possibly various/different) reasons do not want to manage those messages against contacts created in the CRM.
Does that sound right? Does anyone else have a fundamentally different use case?
HubSpot has made improvements in spam handling over the years. Could anyone in Camp #1 please comment with any patterns you detect in the volume and type of messages you get and where you see our Spam filtering working vs not working?
And Camp #2, I’m really curious to hear about the relationship between wanting to monitor and reply to inbound messages in Inbox but not associate those messages with any contacts in the CRM. Why is this? Does it have to do with the amount of inbound messages you receive? Whethere they are current customers, high quality leads, or very low quality leads? Does it depend on if you are using an Inbox for customer support, or maybe pre-sales or event marketing? Does it have to do with a given team email address being used possibly by too many teams for too many purposes?
Multiple people are asking for, and think it’d be ‘easy’ to ‘add a toggle.’ It’s understandable to want a quick solution to stop the pain ASAP.
Someone else commented “My guess is that it is not a simple "fix". If they want to change to add this feature, it breaks more functions in Hubspot.”
For email, at least, this is why we are more carefully considering a solution. You might be familiar with the concept of ‘visitors’ vs ‘contacts’ especially with our Live Chat channel. An implication of the community-proposed solution is something akin to ‘email visitors’ instead of ‘email contacts’ on the backend of our conversations system - we need something, if it is not a CRM object, to associate all the different email conversations to over time. Visitors vs Contacts has implications for Reporting, Automation, and other key features for customers who want to efficently manage customer relationships in the Inbox.
Thanks again for your honest feedback. It is important to us!
Any news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread, so stay tuned!
Thank you all so much for this feedback and direction! I will be reviewing this with the team and will post an update. We have a few upcoming features that should address some of this pain so I will share in the next couple weeks as we have a more details. Thank you!
not yet. what i've done in the meantime is 1. created a saved filter in Contacts for contacts that were created via Conversations and aren't a "Customer" or owned by a sales person 2. created a saved filter in Companies with the same 3. Every 3 days I go into the filters and delete everything.
This would be helpful even for those not using conversations. My sales team has been complaining since we started using HubSpot about how it automatically creates a contact when someone emails them first. They know to uncheck "log to crm" when they email first.. This results in random industry people etc being added to our database that constantly needs to be cleaned now.
Did this feature get developed? Currently drudging through all the no-reply contacts that have been auto-added to Hubspot and it is quite a pain! Would love to have better control over what contacts are added.
It's been a year since your last post. Could you please let us know when will this be solved?
This is obviously a popular request and the "feature" you currently have causes a lot of confusion and extra work for Hubspot users. Please get it fixed!
I actually can't believe this is not a feature. This basically means the Hubspot email tracking functionality is completely unusable by anyone who deals with sensitive emails; executives, VPs, C-Suite. Disappointing as I wanted to use Hubspot but i'll stick to SFDC I guess.
I have a number of clients where I've setup and configured Conversations Inbox for them who after a while ask me to disconnect it as a result of the clutter it causes.
Another option would be one click delete of both the contact and company created directly in the Conversation Inbox.
Currently you can "Block and delete contact" but it leaves the random company in the CRM if automated company creation is turned on. Would be nice to have "Delete contact and company" as an additional option.
This doesn't solve the issue raised by a few people commenting in this thread regarding contacts created by email CC (which is actually a different topic) but it would make monitoring and managing the Conversation Inbox easier.
We're new to HubSpot and just come across the same issue, with no way of stopping it from artifically inflating our number of contacts. Seems a bit unfair when we're charged on our number of contacts.
As our project management uses Conversations to centralize all their communication with our customers and users, and since these are not identical, HubSpot automatically creates contacts that we do not want in our CRM.
Sometimes a user of our SaaS solution is indeed a potential stakeholder and relevant for Marketing and Sales. But most other contacts that we send emails to (for example with login data and help), will not be contacted again.
So, ideally, HubSpot should ask us if a new contact should be created when an unknown email address is inserted in an email within Conversations.
If I chose to add a contact, then I should be asked to fill out the same data fields as I have to do when adding a new contact manually.
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I think this problem was fixed a long time ago ... check this screenshot out ... lol I would be looking at this thread and think "Are these guys serious?" If I was Hubspot lol .... but in our defense, the platform isnt too intuitive? lol jk 😛
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