Sync your HubSpot contacts
Connect HubSpot to Mailsoftly, pick the list your CRM contacts land in, map the fields you need, and keep it current with an hourly one way sync.
If HubSpot is where your contacts really live, exporting a CSV every few weeks is a job nobody wants. The native HubSpot connection does it for you: your CRM contacts land in a Mailsoftly list, and new and updated ones arrive every hour after that.
Read this line before anything else, because it decides how you use the rest of the guide. The sync runs one way and read only, from HubSpot into Mailsoftly. Mailsoftly asks HubSpot for permission to read contacts and for nothing else, so nothing you do here can create, edit or delete a single record in your portal.
Open HubSpot from your integrations catalog
Everything starts on the Integrations screen. The HubSpot tile sits near the top of the catalog, or type hubspot into the search box to jump to it. Clicking the tile opens the HubSpot page, which is where connecting, setting up and checking on the sync all happen.
HubSpot is admin only. If you are not an admin on your Mailsoftly account the tile is not hidden behind a locked screen, it simply does not appear in your catalog. Ask an admin on your team to set the connection up once; everyone else works with the contacts it brings in, exactly like any other list.
Connect your HubSpot account
The HubSpot page opens on its connect screen, with three promises on it and a Connect HubSpot button underneath. Press it and you are handed to HubSpot’s own authorize page, signed in as yourself, to pick the account you want to link.
HubSpot will ask you to grant read access to contacts. That is the whole request: crm.objects.contacts.read, plus the standard permission every HubSpot app needs to identify itself. There is no write permission in the list, which is why the screen can promise that Mailsoftly never writes anything to your HubSpot account.
Approve it and you come straight back to Mailsoftly, now showing your portal number and a Connected badge. Change your mind on HubSpot’s screen and cancel instead, and you land back on the same page with HubSpot’s own explanation on it and nothing saved. You can start again whenever you like.
One HubSpot portal connects to one Mailsoftly account. If you reconnect the same portal later your settings are waiting for you. If you connect a different portal, the destination list and the field mapping are cleared, because a different portal is a different set of contacts.
Choose the destination list and map your fields
Connecting is only half of it. Mailsoftly now asks where the contacts should land and which extra details you want to carry across.
Destination list. Pick one of your existing email lists, or choose Create a new list and give it a name; the box comes prefilled with HubSpot Contacts. Every imported HubSpot contact joins that one list, and it behaves like any other list from then on: you can segment it, send to it, and see it in your Contact Lists screen. Only plain email lists are offered here, so an SMS list will not appear in the picker.
Field mapping. Four fields are matched for you and shown locked, because the importer always handles them: Email, First name, Last name and Company. Under them, press Add field to build a row of your own. On the left you choose the Mailsoftly field that gets filled: Phone, Mobile phone, Work phone, Job title, Website, Industry, Address line 1, Address line 2, City, State, Zip code or Country. You can also send a property into one of your own custom fields, or choose Create a new custom field and name it right there. On the right you choose the HubSpot property that fills it, picked from your portal’s real property list.
Two rules keep the mapping honest. One HubSpot property fills one Mailsoftly field, and one Mailsoftly field is fed by one property, so nothing can quietly fight over the same column. And any HubSpot property you do not map is never even requested, so it never leaves your portal.
Press Start sync and the first import begins.
Send the sync into a list of its own rather than into a list you already mail. You get a clean before and after, and if the mapping needs changing you can see exactly which contacts came from HubSpot.
Watch the first import, then let the hourly sync do the work
The first import is a full walk through your portal, so it takes longer than anything that follows. A progress bar on the page counts contacts as it goes, and you can leave the page while it runs; it keeps going and the page catches up on its own. Because it is a real import, it also lands in your import history with everything that hangs off one, including the list quality scan and your list health grade.
After that, Mailsoftly checks HubSpot at the top of every hour and pulls in whatever changed since the last check. The Sync health card on the right says so plainly: Connection Active, Schedule Hourly, and Next sync in about so many minutes.
If you cannot wait for the hour, press Sync now in the page header. It fetches everything that has changed since the last sync, not the whole portal again, and it tells you what happened: sync started, or a polite refusal if one ran a moment ago. Repeated presses are throttled by a few minutes on purpose, since queueing the same run twice would only slow it down.
The four counters across the middle are the whole story of the sync: Imported, Updated, Skipped (consent) and Skipped (no email). Each one shows the running total since you connected, with the last sync underneath it. Below them, Recent activity lists only the runs that actually changed something, so an hour that found nothing never clutters it.
Know exactly what the sync will and will not do
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where CRM syncs usually surprise people.
- It never writes back to HubSpot. Edit a synced contact in Mailsoftly, unsubscribe them, tag them, delete them: none of it reaches your portal. Mailsoftly has read permission and nothing else.
- It never overwrites what you already have. When a HubSpot contact matches an address you already hold, Mailsoftly fills in the blanks and leaves everything else alone. A phone number you corrected by hand stays corrected. The contact is added to the destination list and counted under Updated.
- A new address becomes a new contact on the destination list, counted under Imported, and its profile records HubSpot as the source, so you can always prove where an address came from.
- People who opted out in HubSpot never arrive. Anyone marked as opted out of email, or as a non marketing contact, is left in the portal and counted under Skipped (consent). That counter is a protection doing its job, not an error.
- Contacts without an email address are skipped, counted under Skipped (no email), for the obvious reason.
- Your suppression list and your unsubscribes still rule. The sync does not touch them and cannot undo them. Someone who unsubscribed from you, or who is on your suppression list, will not be sent to just because HubSpot handed them over again.
The sync filters out the people HubSpot says opted out. It does not, by itself, prove that everybody else opted in. Treat synced contacts the way you would treat any list you inherited: mail the people who agreed to hear from you, and give the rest a reason to opt in before you send them a campaign.
Change your settings, or disconnect
Everything stays editable. The three dot More actions menu beside Sync now holds Edit settings, which reopens the destination list picker and the field mapping. Saving there does not re-import anything; a new destination simply starts filling from the next sync onwards.
Choose Disconnect in the same menu and Mailsoftly asks you to confirm, with the two things that matter written on the box: contacts that were already imported stay on your list and nothing is deleted, and the hourly sync stops, so new and updated HubSpot contacts no longer arrive. Confirm and Mailsoftly gives up its access to your portal and removes itself from your HubSpot account.
While the connection is live, the destination list cannot be deleted. Mailsoftly tells you why and offers you the two ways out: disconnect HubSpot, or point the sync at a different list first. Archiving the list is not a way around it either, since contacts would keep arriving somewhere nobody looks; the page warns you if that happens.
Two things worth knowing about a connection that goes quiet. If HubSpot revokes access, or somebody uninstalls the app on that side, the page carries a short explanation at the top with a Reconnect HubSpot button, and the account owner gets one email about it rather than one an hour. And when you reconnect the same portal, your destination list and your field mapping are exactly where you left them.
Ready to try it in your own account?
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