Email sent to Zendesk Support can be suspended or rejected. Suspended email is not necessarily spam. This article explains the other reasons tickets can be suspended and what to do about them.
For information, see the support tip What does "Detected as spam" mean?
This article discusses the following topics:
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What are suspended tickets?
When an end-user submits a support request by email, in most cases the email becomes a new ticket or adds a comment to an existing ticket. In certain cases though, the email is suspended. Suspending an email means putting it aside for further review. It's not necessarily spam. It's just not a ticket in Zendesk Support yet. It remains in limbo until somebody reviews it and decides whether to accept or reject it. If nobody reviews it, the email is deleted after 14 days.
Suspended emails are displayed in a system-generated view.
To view suspended emails
- Click the Views (
) icon in the sidebar and then click the Suspended Tickets view.
An email can be suspended for several reasons, some for intentional policy reasons. A common reason is that the email is from an unregistered user when you require users to register. Example:
For more information, see What causes tickets to be suspended? below.
We recommend implementing a process for reviewing suspended emails. See Guidelines for reviewing suspended tickets.
- The email is spam. If the email is rated as having a 99% or better chance of being spam, it's rejected. If the rating is less than a 99%, the email is suspended to give you a chance to confirm that it's really spam.
- You blacklisted the email address or domain. See Using the whitelist and blacklist to control access to Zendesk Support.
What causes emails to be suspended?
Emails are suspended for a number of reasons, including:
- The sender is not allowed to create or update a ticket
- The sender is not a person
- The email failed DMARC authentication
See Causes of suspended tickets for more detailed information.
The sender is not allowed to create or update tickets
An email can be suspended if you require users to register before submitting their first ticket, or if your instance of Zendesk Support is closed or restricted that limits who can submit tickets.
- Open requires users to register, anybody can submit tickets as long as they register first. After submitting a first ticket, the ticket is suspended and a welcome email is sent to the new user requiring them to register before the ticket can be submitted. After the user verifies their email address and creates a password, the ticket is unsuspended.
- Closed permits designated users can create or update tickets. An administrator designates who can submit tickets. If an unknown person tries to submit a ticket, the email is suspended.
- Restricted permits only users with email addresses in certain domains can register and submit tickets. Emails in other domains are either suspended or completely rejected, depending on your setup.
A sender can also be prevented from updating a ticket if the email token identifying the ticket is stripped from the reply email.
The sender is not a person
Emails are suspended if Zendesk Support detects they're not from real users. Examples:
- Suspected spam
- Automated response emails, including out of office or vacation auto-generated response emails
- Emails from system users such as mail-daemon@
- Emails with a 'no-reply' address
The email attachments failed DMARC authentication
Emails are suspended if they do not pass Zendesk's DMARC authentication policies.
For more information, see Authenticating incoming email using DMARC.
Using the blacklist and whitelist to refine the suspended tickets view
If you find that your suspended tickets view includes too many spam emails (which should be rejected instead), or too many valid emails (which should be accepted), you can use the blacklist and whitelist features to help refine what is routed into the view.
- The blacklist can help you identify and isolate known spam addresses.
- The whitelist can help you route valid emails to your inbox.
Reducing spam in the suspended tickets view
Zendesk uses spam detection software to rate incoming email. If the email is rated as having a 99% or greater chance of being spam, it's rejected and you never see it. If it's rated as having less than a 99% chance of being spam, the email is added to your suspended tickets to give you a chance to confirm that it's really spam.
If you find that you're receiving more spam emails than you'd like in your suspended tickets queue, you can use the blacklist to reject specific email addresses and domains. See Using the whitelist and blacklist to control access to Zendesk Support.
Reducing valid emails in the suspended tickets view
The whitelist is used in conjunction with the blacklist to restrict access to your Zendesk. Emails submitted by end-users on the blacklist are suspended or rejected. The whitelist specifies who is exempt from the blacklist rules, as well as bypassing some standard causes for email suspension.
- Messages sent into Zendesk from noreply@domain.com would be suspended, but will create tickets normally if the source address is present in the whitelist.
- Email from a whitelisted user can still be suspended because the user hasn't registered yet (cause of suspension: "User must sign up to submit email, user notified").
For more information, see Using the whitelist and blacklist to control access to Zendesk Support.
72 Comments
Hi Support team,
I've read through a few of the comments and only saw one with my issue, but I didn't see a response for it.
The issue I'm having is that one of our email addresses is setup as a support address in Zendesk. We've been experimenting with certain rules for that mailbox so that none of the emails sent to that address actually stay in the inbox. I ended up setting up a redirect rule to go straight to our Zendesk, but now quite a few of the tickets that get created are marked as spam with the "Received from a support address" message. Is there a way to combat this issue? I understand that Zendesk is setup to allow forwards to go through, but if a message is redirected and it shows as coming from the support address it gets blocked, which is not what we want happening.
Hey, Brandon -
If you've set up a true redirect, we should be able to recognize the incoming email as having been forwarded, and treat the original sender as the requester. If you sent an email directly from your support email to Zendesk, it will be suspended. This is in order to avoid mail loop problems, and because Zendesk sends on behalf of your support email address. We are at this time unable to support email being sent from your support address to Zendesk for any reason.
If you think your redirect might not be working as expected, we should file a ticket.
we want a way to limit viewing and handling suspended tickets by permissions. we dont' want all agents doing this...
Hi all, do suspended tickets get counted in the "New Tickets" stat?
@eva nope - only when recovered.
Phew, thanks @Andrew, this is exactly how I was hoping it would work.
Hi, is there a way so that a certain domain(@xxxxx.net) can be received without going to Suspended tickets(via Detected as spam) or require anonymous user to register? We'd like to receive all tickets from these domains without registering users but whitelist seems to work for only those who registered.
Hi Yeh! Great question. As it turns out, there currently isn't an option to whitelist domains of anonymous users. Since the whitelist is only available when requiring users to register, the only option would be to recover those suspended tickets that are being marked as spam.
Hi - Can anyone tell me what the rate limits are on the cause: Email loop?
Hi Carsten, We're very sorry, our rate limits are not public facing information. They can change under certain conditions, particularly once the threshold has been breached, which makes it very difficult to just provide a numeric answer that will always be true. If you are having a specific problem then it would be very helpful if you would create a ticket with us at support@zendesk.com. We'd be happy to take a closer look.
Hi Can you please advise, if i add the no-reply email addresses into whitelist, does zendesk still separates these emails as suspended? Because i do want to receive some specific no-reply emails into my zendesk account as a ticket?
An email sent from a no-reply@ address is suspended with what we call a "soft rule". That means that adding that specific email address to your whitelist should allow those messages through as tickets.
We're having a lot of issues with customer tickets being marked as spam by Zendesk. Are there any ways to adjust those settings and improve that?
Also, is there an API for adding email addresses to the whitelist? We sign up too many new customers each day to add them all to the whitelist manually, but I'm not seeing documentation of any API for that feature.
This is a major issue for us, and ZD support has not been helpful, so any advice would be much appreciated.
Hey Alex!
I see you're getting assistance with this issue in a ticket. We'll get you taken care of there! Please feel free to come back and share the solution later, if you'd like.
Like Heather R already asked I would like to restrict the suspended tickets view (and hide) for agents. In our case the administrator handles those.
We have multiple emails sending the same spam message. Is there a way to force that to be recognized and suspended? Because it is coming from different emails, they are coming to our inbox instead of Suspended tickets.
Hi Chris!
Sorry to hear you are dealing with these spam messages. It is helpful to continue marking these messages as spam so the spam filters can learn to identify them better. However, if the content is the same you could build a trigger to recognize a unique string in the spam messages and have the tickets close when they are created. This would at least keep those tickets from clogging up your workflow.
Thanks Brad! We got a little more than 10,000 messages before we blocked the IP, so we had a few people tackle moving them to spam and then deleting them. It took us a couple of days. I will make note of the trigger option if we run into this situation again.
The contact forms on my website are coming in as "Detected email as being from a system user"
The 'From' is showing the submitter's email address so I'm not sure what to adjust to ensure these e-mails don't end up here - please advise!
The other option (which I haven't been able to find) is the ability to embed a contact form on my site (rather than the help widget).
please advise
Hi Simon,
I'm going to reach out to you on a ticket to discuss this further with you as we're seeing something different in your account. Be in touch with you from here. :)
How can I blacklist specific phrases rather than email addresses?
Hi Dawid -
There's no content blacklist functionality per se, however there are ways you can put it together via triggers.
For example, one way you could handle it would be to create a trigger and a view. You could use the "comment text contains" condition to activate the trigger based on keywords or phrases Then you could have the trigger action be a label (like "moderation" or "spam") and create a view just for that tag. This would allow for easy moderation of those messages, which you could delete or go in once a day and suspend those users.
Let me know if that helps, or if you have additional questions.
Hi Nicole,
Thank you for the suggestions.
The problem is that some of our clients try to use their own support systems, so we receive a bunch of valid requests but also some useless notifications from the same email addresses. For that reason, I'd like a way of ignoring certain incoming messages completely (a regex exclusion mechanism would be sweet) without suspending the users.
Cheers
Hey Dawid -
That makes sense. We don't have that functionality built in to the system at the moment, but you're welcome to head over to the Product Feedback topic and suggest it. I do encourage you to read through the posting guidelines first, and make sure to include the specifics of your example.
Hi Guys
Hope you can help!
We use Fixflo for our customers to submit queries, they are all hitting our suspended tickets.
The requester shows as the customer directly, so whitelisting would not work in this scenario.
Is there a way I can avoid these tickets going to suspended?
If it helps the subject of all of these tickets start with the same thing, "Problem Reported:"
Thank you in advance
Harriet
Hi Harriet!
What is showing up as the reason for suspension in your Suspended ticket queue? That'll help pinpoint what we might be able to do.
Hi guys,
Two questions:
Is there a way to limit access to the suspended view?
Is there a way to see a log of suspended actions? i.e. who recovered or deleted a suspended ticket and when.
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