Question
Are outgoing emails in Zendesk encrypted to end-users?
Answer
Zendesk Support and Zendesk Chat have opportunistic support for Transport Layer Security (TLS), a cryptographic protocol for email exchanges, that is enabled automatically on every account. Emails are encrypted whenever an inbox provider supports encrypted messages. If the receiving server does not accept encryption, ESMTP is used instead.
For more information on Zendesk’s security features, see our page below:
https://www.zendesk.com/product/zendesk-security/
10 Comments
@zendeskSupport - has this answered changed since the new EU laws (GDPR) have been implemented?
I would also like to learn more about this.
Hi Nedula and Helle -
You can visit our EU Data Protection site to learn about all of the changes and compliance related features and functionality. If you have questions that are unanswered by that site, please email them to privacy@zendesk.com for further assistance.
A direct link to the articles about email encryption would have been nice. It is almost impossible to find anything on that site. I can't find where I can search on that site. And sending an email to legal demands that you have a lot of patience.
Maybe I just don't understand the EU data protection site.
I've updated the wording to be more clear.
More information, from Dyn: https://dyn.com/blog/opportunistic-tls-for-email-security/
In short -- They are likely encrypted if the receiving/sending servers are supporting TLS.
Dyn Mentions a transparency report for their server -- you can see the same for our email servers (zdsys.com) here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?search=zdsys.com
Thanks Ryan W
Just to be clear. What about incoming mails?
If the customer's server is supporting TLS and the customer is sending an email to our Zendesk is this mail then encrypted with TLS ?
As I understand- then both servers are supporting TLS
Hi Helle!
That is correct for incoming emails as well. The emails are encrypted via TLS, as described here.
Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see a detailed description at that link. I'm trying to understand this in depth -- we of course have emails flying all over the place, through all sorts of servers, all the hops along the way, and so forth. What are the odds, really, that TLS is being used at some percentage of those possible exchanges? Mightn't the email be encrypted at some points, but not at others along the way? Would love to get more details. Thanks.
Hi Marci,
The page you've viewed is as much, as available to public. In short:
What are the odds, really, that TLS is being used at some percentage of those possible exchanges?
Mightn't the email be encrypted at some points, but not at others along the way?
Hopefully this answers your questions is some way. Let us know if you have any further concerns or some examples to review and we'll be happy to help.
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