HubSpot connected inboxes | Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers and general information quickly regarding connecting your email inbox to HubSpot. A connected inbox is required to send emails through the CRM and make use of certain Sales Hub and Service Hub features. 

What does connecting an inbox to HubSpot do?

After you connect your inbox, any replies to emails that you sent from the CRM, or from your mail client using the HubSpot sales email extension, will then automatically log in your CRM. You can also track any email sent from your CRM in your connected inbox's Sent folder (Google Apps, Gmail, and Office 365 inboxes only).

How are emails and attachments processed for connected Office 365 and Exchange Online inboxes?

HubSpot tracks and logs your emails differently based on the type of inbox you connect. 

How are attachments handled by HubSpot?

If an email is logged to a contact record via the HubSpot Sales Plugin, or the email is synced with HubSpot via a connected inbox, any attachments

Can I connect my inbox to HubSpot via POP3?

No. HubSpot only provides the ability for users to connect their inboxes to HubSpot via IMAP. POP3 and IMAP are both methods used to access your email from a server.

POP3

POP3 downloads the email to your machine. When an email is sent to your email address, it's stored on your email server. When you open your email client, the email client will actually download the email to your device. Once it's downloaded to your device, it is removed from the email server and only stored locally on your machine.

For example, if you have your email set up via POP3 and open your email on your mobile device, it will download the emails there. If you check your email on a computer, there won't be any emails to show you since they were already downloaded to your mobile phone.

IMAP

IMAP allows you to access their emails across devices. When you access your email via IMAP, it keeps the original email on the email server and simply downloads a local copy of the email to your device. This way, you can access all of your email on any device, at any time.

HubSpot needs to be able to access your email at all times. For this reason, your email needs to always be available on your email server so that HubSpot can see it. Connecting via IMAP allows for this; POP3 doesn't.

If you're looking at your email client settings and notice that you're set up via POP3, you'll need to work with your IT team to change this to IMAP. Once that's done, you should see the IMAP/SMTP servers and ports in your email client settings to input into HubSpot to connect.

How does HubSpot find replies to log after I connect my inbox?

Once you connect your inbox, HubSpot has access to information about your emails including the email address you’re sending from, the email addresses of recipients, the subject line, and the body of the email. 

Every “reply” email contains a reference to the unique ID number of the original email. The HubSpot CRM will monitor incoming mail for replies that tie back to an email sent from the CRM or logged (BCC’d) to the CRM. The HubSpot CRM will only read and store the email body for email threads that have been previously logged in the CRM or sent from the CRM.

What information is logged in the CRM?

When you log an email to a contact record in the CRM or receive an email reply from them, the HubSpot CRM stores your contact’s email address, name, subject line, and body text so that the email can be displayed as part of their contact record in the CRM. The email is stored and displayed just as if you had BCC’d or forwarded that email to the CRM. Attachments sent outside of the CRM will be stored in the Attachments section in the contact record.

What does the HubSpot CRM do with the body text of emails I send through the CRM?

The HubSpot CRM only ever uses the text of your emails to display the emails on the contact record of the recipient in your CRM. HubSpot doesn’t share that information to people outside your team, sell it, or engage in any sort of anonymized collection of email bodies for analytics.

How does HubSpot handle security with connected inboxes?

Whenever HubSpot transmits or stores your personal data, HubSpot works hard to protect it. For example, HubSpot encrypts data while exchanging it with your computer and uses top security measures to prevent unauthorized or unintended access to our network. Read more about how HubSpot safeguards your data on HubSpot's security page.

How long is email data stored in HubSpot?

• Emails sent using the sequences tool are stored indefinitely unless your HubSpot account is deleted.
• Emails sent from the contact timeline are retained unless the corresponding engagement or your HubSpot account is deleted, at which point they may be retained for up to 90 days before being purged.
• Emails received in a connected inbox and logged to the contact timeline will be retained unless the corresponding engagement or your HubSpot account is deleted, at which point they'll be retained for up to 90 days before being purged.
• All email bodies from all connected inboxes, regardless of whether they're shown on a contact timeline, are stored for 7 days before they are automatically purged.
• All email metadata from all connected inboxes, regardless of whether they're shown on the contact timeline, are stored for up to 60 days for all connected inboxes before being automatically purged.
  • This metadata is stored for triage purposes when contacting support, and includes information in the email headers.
  • Metadata does not include the email body (e.g., attachments, plain text, and/or the HTML section of the email).

Why is the email sent from my inbox taking a long time to appear in the CRM?

If you're using Microsoft Outlook or Exchange, performance issues can occur when syncing from folders with over 100,000 items. To resolve this, review Microsoft's documentation for recommendations. 

Why isn't the email I sent from the CRM showing up in the sent folder in my email inbox?

After connecting your email inbox to HubSpot using IMAP, the emails you send from contact, company, or deal records in HubSpot may not appear in your sent folder.

When an email is sent through the CRM, the email's data is actually transferred from HubSpot to your email provider. Your email provider then sends the email to the recipient through their SMTP servers.

If the inbox that you connected using IMAP supports special-use mailboxes flags, such as mailboxes for draft messages or sent messages, HubSpot will copy the message to the folder with the sent attribute. If the mailbox does not support special-use mailboxes, HubSpot will copy the message to the first folder it can find that contains sent in the label.

Why did my email inbox get disconnected?

If you receive a notification that your email inbox was disconnected, an issue may have occurred with your email provider, and you'll need to reconnect your inbox. Common issues that will cause an inbox to disconnect include:

• Access was revoked to the HubSpot app.
• Your password to the email inbox account changed.

Based on the type of inbox you connected, there might be other reasons why your inbox got disconnected:

• Office 365: your mailbox has undergone a migration.
• IMAP: your IMAP server was unavailable for an extended period of time, or the server revoked HubSpot's connection. Learn more about troubleshooting IMAP connection errors.
• Exchange: your Exchange server was unavailable for an extended period of time, or the server revoked HubSpot's connection. Learn more about troubleshooting Exchange connection errors.
• Gmail: you revoked access to the HubSpot app in Google Security Center.

Please note: as of December 2019, users will need to reconnect their Gmail inboxes, because of new security and privacy enhancements to the HubSpot-Gmail inbox connection.

Why are unrelated emails showing in the same thread?

If you're seeing unrelated emails in the same thread, this could be because of how you're composing new emails. When writing a new email to a new contact, if you click forward on a sent email, remove the forwarded text at the top, then change the email recipient before sending, these emails will appear in the same thread. This is because the other emails reference the original email and therefore thread together.

While the exact steps may differ between email clients, it is not recommended to click the reply or forward buttons to send a new email, but rather use the templates tool to quickly send pre-made emails to different contacts.