HubSpot Ideas

sgrun

Import Historical Emails

Many people want to start using Hubspot with their entire company's email history associated with the correct Hubspot Contact/Company, and visible to all Hubspot Users.

 

For many companies, historical email history is the *single* most important record of the interaction you and your colleagues have had with your customers and prospects.

 

This is a vital and common feature to other CRM's, like Close, Pipedrive, Zoho, SalesforceIQ, FreshSales...the list goes on.

 

The current solution that Hubspot offers is NOT effective. We need the import of emails to be A) automatic, and B) historical (including before we started using Hubspot). Logging, bcc, shared inboxes, etc., do not cut the mustard.

 

There are third-party companies that offer this, such as Threads, & MigrateMyCRM, but we all want a native Hubspot solution. The fact that multiple companies have built this should be a blinking neon sign highlighting just how much this is needed.

 

You can see people requesting this at:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Gmail-Sales-Extension/How-to-import-history-emails-from-gmail/td-p/...

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Outlook-Sales-Extension/New-to-Hubspot-Log-old-emails-into-CRM-via-...

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Marketing-Tool/Can-I-retrospectively-sync-pas-Outlook-Gmail-e...

 

So please, pretty please, with sugar on top. Build the *** Email Integration

 

 

sugar-on-top.jpg

 

HubSpot Updates
Re: Auto-Import All Historical Email (Including Emails written BEFORE using Hubspot) - changed to: Not Currently Planned
March 19, 2021 04:49 PM

Hi everyone - Thanks so much for your comments and engagements on this thread. We take your feedback very seriously and have been tracking the popularity of this request. We don't currently have the bandwidth to tackle this work right now, so I'm updating the status of this idea to reflect that. Apologies that it's not better news, but I will be back here with an update if and when we are able to move forward with this!

February 16, 2021 02:14 PM

Once HubSpot Sales is installed with a connected personal email inbox, a user can enable the 'log' feature so when they send emails moving forward, those emails will automatically log inside a HubSpot contact.

But, what about past emails that were sent before the extension was installed?

Currently, the only way to 'log' previously sent emails is via the 'forward' feature and you must do that one-by-one on each individual email you want to forward.

My suggestion is to implement a bulk forward solution so users do not have to do this one-by-one. Thanks for the consideration! 

 

Reference https://knowledge.hubspot.com/settings/log-email-in-your-crm-with-the-bcc-or-forwarding-address

Re: Auto-Import All Historical Email (Including Emails written BEFORE using Hubspot) - changed to: Idea Submitted
August 31, 2020 07:19 AM

Hi @sgrun,

 

I am the Product Manager for Marketing Email. Thank you for the submission and for all the upvotes. We are looking into this request and i will update the forum when I have more feedback for you. 

Best,

 

Shane

59 Replies
Shmul1234
Member

Filing an old email into a selected company or contact in Hubspot is a MUST have feature !!

Exist in any other CRM systems.!

Please consider adding this feature.

 

AOC
Member

I just signed up with Hubspot to realize that that there is no easy way to import old emails. I can see a thread with this request is going on for many years. Would be great if  company management paid attention to this request.

ebazalia
Participant

Muy necesario!! No es posible enviar cada correo historial a Hubspot, la plataforma debe poder coger el historial de correos de cada lead despues de la integracion del correo. Pipedrive lo hace.

moodwall
Member

I have used other CRMs (Copper/Prosperworks) which treats emails differently than Hubspot. It is better in some ways and not in others. Where Copper is better is that is sync in emails from Gmail and can pull in historical emails on contacts which can be helpful if there are important emails prior to adding the contact in Hubspot or prior to when a user was added into the Hubspot CRM. In addition, it synced all emails and all emails related to a contact were automatically associated to a deal in which the contact was associated. This ensures that all emails are searchable in a deal. At the moment, Hubspot requires emails sent to be tagged to a specific deal and limits the amount of deals it tags emails to (5 most recent deals). The prolem is this can cause some emails to be missed/lost if a user does not tag them correctly or forgets to. It also has the issue of inbound emails from the contact to be auto tagged to only the 5 most recent deals which may or may not be correct.

 

In the end, I think it is best to have an option to sync email in the same fashion that Copper treats emails. The trade off being all deals will show all emails for a contact, but with the benefit that no deal will mistakenly be missing an email.

ryanjarvisx
Participant

@hubspot when do you plan to integrate this feature?

OmairH
Contributor

@hubspot 

 

I have over 81000 email interactions between 450 clients. I am using Copper/Prosperworks & it automatically imports history from your gsuite account for all new contacts created. My team will have absolutely no clue about the past interactions with our clients as they will not be able to see the email history. We are trying to switch the CRM between our low/off sales season and realize that we will be sitting ducks for our competitors when high season starts if my team cannot see client email history & therefore will not be able align their sales strategy according to previous closings.

 

This is a deal-breaker as HS had started growing on my team. This makes me think that HS is not geared for existing/established businesses - rather for new businessses or ones that didn't previously use any CRM.

 

Is HS planning to offer this feature in the near future? A lot of people on this thread would like to know HS position on this so as to make an informed decision about using HS as a CRM.

Shane_Janssens
HubSpot Product Team

Hi @sgrun,

 

I am the Product Manager for Marketing Email. Thank you for the submission and for all the upvotes. We are looking into this request and i will update the forum when I have more feedback for you. 

Best,

 

Shane

SteveVenton
Contributor

Yes, I really need this. 

 

I get a new enquiry from an unsolicited contact, I add them to Hubspot, Great. That works but now I want to log the email that they sent me. A single click in Gmail / Outlook should be all that it takes. 

 

Zdravko
Member

@Shane_Janssens - I also really need this. I've tried with Thread but prefer to have it as part of the CRM, even for additional cost. 

CamilleCocaud
Member

How is this STILL not a feature?!? 😕

simwyss
Member

I agree that this feature is needed. 

 

In the meantime I help myself with a combo of two (payable) services:

 

https://sigparser.com/ - this helps me to turn Emails of the last 5 years into contacts (including footer data)

https://threads.cloud/migrate-your-historic-emails-to-hubspot/ - One time service to actually import the Emails of the last 5 years and relate them to these contacts. 

 

 

 

ifzabaleta
Participant

We need it asap!!

if we want to migrate to Hubspot from Copper, this is a must

BC0
Participant

4 months since last update from Hubspot telling us they were looking at this. Clearly Agile is not something that Hubspot deploy - please get your fingers out and get this resolved!

ARivera6
Member

I second this. Very important feature be included. 

llegault
HubSpot Product Team

Once HubSpot Sales is installed with a connected personal email inbox, a user can enable the 'log' feature so when they send emails moving forward, those emails will automatically log inside a HubSpot contact.

But, what about past emails that were sent before the extension was installed?

Currently, the only way to 'log' previously sent emails is via the 'forward' feature and you must do that one-by-one on each individual email you want to forward.

My suggestion is to implement a bulk forward solution so users do not have to do this one-by-one. Thanks for the consideration! 

 

Reference https://knowledge.hubspot.com/settings/log-email-in-your-crm-with-the-bcc-or-forwarding-address

Isaac_Anderson
Member

Currently Husbpot only allows you to view email history when emails are sent via Hubspot. This is a poor user experience for sales associates who frequently email their contacts outside a CRM before a contact is a lead (referral introductions, incoming quotes that initiate the email thread, etc). All previous correspondence needs to be manually added as notes, and you do not have the ability to reply to a past email. I'd appreciate the ability to sync and view all email history with an existing hubspot contact. We're already using IMAP. 

 

(we're using sales pro) 

hroberts
HubSpot Product Team

Hi everyone - Thanks so much for your comments and engagements on this thread. We take your feedback very seriously and have been tracking the popularity of this request. We don't currently have the bandwidth to tackle this work right now, so I'm updating the status of this idea to reflect that. Apologies that it's not better news, but I will be back here with an update if and when we are able to move forward with this!

OLM
Participant

@hroberts You want to get the extra resources from management to tackle this? Remind them this is not just any feature, it is a migration feature. As in, something that is causing HubSpot to lose potential new customers. How much do you spend on marketing and advertising to get a potential customer to look at HubSpot only for them to rule it out early because they can't migrate their email history? This is worth addressing.

simwyss
Member

Just a quick update - The guys from

 

https://threads.cloud/migrate-your-historic-emails-to-hubspot/

were really helpful in expanding on the feature set of their Email integration (in my case O365 with Hubspot). Now I can filter my contacts in Hubspot to search for "have not had email exchange in March" or similar questions...  We sync all Emails from our team so we also don't need the Outlook Plug-in from Hubspot... It happens all in the background...

TheSpade888
Participant

Hello Community,

I'm a pretty seasoned CRM user and also a developer. I have been working with quite a few system for the better part of 30 years and lately one Open Source CRM by the name Suite CRM. What made me look in to that particular system was among other things the import capabilities that are provided. Unfortunately the versions I've been working on have all rather poor e-mail handling. A new version is on the horizon which perhaps will address some of the issues.
For me Hubspot is showing huge potential for a SMB's but perhaps a bit on the pricey side. The deal breaker for me and hence all my clients is the lack of historic e-mail import. If starting up today, it may be fine but as so many bear witness about, not being able to handle the historic e-mail info kills any ambition for businesses with e-mail history. So after spending the better part of 6 hours configuring and testing a free Hubspot account, I learned what I took for granted, native historic e-mail import, is none existent. I do understand that it would create a lot of strains on resources but by using traffic shaping technology that could be used to cap the utilization of resources to an acceptable level. If the import procedure took weeks for large volumes of data could perhaps be acceptable for some as long as it worked its way from present to backwards in time. 
Regards!