A client recently reported that they had a lot of ‘bad contacts’ in their CRM system. They complained about contact records with only the email address filled in that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Dynamics 365 - Empty contact record

After investigation, we found out that all of these contacts were auto-generated by SYSTEM. After digging a little further, it turned out they had queues automatically creating contacts. More precisely, the contacts were created for emails that arrived in an incoming queue. So every time an email from an unknown sender arrived in that specific queue, the system would automatically create a contact. As CRM only knows the email address of the sender, this resulted in very poor data quality. It created a lot of ’empty’ contact records, with only an email address and last name.

Dynamics 365 - Incoming Queue generates contacts

Finding the correct Dynamics 365 settings

Immediately I thought about the personal email settings in Dynamics 365. As described in the microsoft docs page , there are quite a lot of personal options to be set in Dynamics 365 when it comes to email and synchronization. I remembered there is an option to automatically create contacts or leads for incoming email messages from unknown senders.

Dynamics 365 - Personal settings for incoming email

Now this is a personal setting, and surely isn’t related to queues, right? Well, that’s what I thought too. I went ahead and searched for a similar setting on the queue form or mailbox form, but couldn’t find anything remotely similar to this specific option.

After pulling my hairs out for a couple of hours, I came across this post on the Dynamics Community blog. Although the original post in the article is no longer available, it did solve my problem. It turns out that queues actually take the personal settings from the Owner of the queue… Even public queues!

In our case, the public queue was created by a Service Account, so I had to update the personal settings through the XrmToolbox plugin called User Settings Utility.

Dynamics 365 - Change user settings with xrmtoolbox

After that change… No more queues automatically creating contacts!