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:
Related articles:
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 Ryan Frye
I agree with Brett, you'll likely want to contact them. Also, what reasoning for the suspended ticket is Zendesk giving you? If it's because the Ring Central user has a zendesk email associated with it, it could be as easy as changing the email the Ring Central user uses to create the ticket.
Lastly, I'm pretty sure Ring Central has more than one way to integrate with Zendesk. We happen to use the NICE In Contact Frontline Agent Console which works pretty well and attaches a voicemail.
Hi Brett & Heather,
Thank you for the replies. We don't have an integration setup at this time, we use the email forwarding. It's the same email that we use to forward our normal support tickets into Zendesk. I've tried whitelisting the email address.
I'll take a look at the article as well as the possible integrations.
Best regards,
Ryan
Trying to understand the sequence of events with Recovering Suspended Tickets. If I have a 30 suspended tickets, and it's a mixture of: true spam, a couple items I need to work, and some Out of Office Replies... when I Recover all 30 items, what steps occur first?
Will ALL items be forced over as an actual ticket, then my rule and triggers will be ran?
Or will "certain" items be deleted before an actual ticket is created?
The only reason I asked this question is I believe our actual Tickets Created tally on the main Tickets Dashboard is much higher than the actual tickets we need to work (aka "workable tickets").
Can anyone provide any thoughts, insights or clarity for me?
Hey Richard,
We actually have an article that goes over recovering tickets here: Viewing, recovering, and deleting suspended tickets
Once a ticket has been recovered, it will be treated as a new incoming ticket and triggers should run as normal. If you run into any errors recovering a ticket, check out this article: Suspended Ticket Could not be Recovered Error
Let me know if you have additional questions or concerns.
Cheers!
Hi Brett - I should be more specific about my question as the currently published information doesn't answer my question.
To re-frame, I'm trying to figure out my Total Tickets are counted. If 100 emails go into the Inbox, I understand that all of those received a Ticket # and those would be counted towards my Total Tickets widget on the dashboard.
If 50 emails go directly into Suspended Tickets, i would obviously go to "recover" them by using all of my Triggers that I've set up. Would ALL 50 of them count towards to my Total Tickets, or would only those that weren't deleted count? I'm trying to figure out if all 50 Suspended Tickets FIRST get assigned a ticket number, THEN all triggers are ran on them? Or do the triggers run FIRST, thereby deleting some, then only those NOT deleted get assigned a ticket number.
Does that provide more clarification for you? Sorry for the confusion.
Hi Richard,
I appreciate the clarification!
The dashboard would not include any tickets that were deleted from the Suspended queue. Only tickets recovered from the Suspended tickets view. Technically, these emails are not assigned a ticket # until they have been recovered from that view. So if they remain in this view or get deleted, it will not count towards your Total Tickets. Triggers will only run on these emails that have been recovered from the Suspended Tickets view since they aren't considered tickets until after recovery.
Hope this clears up any confusion!
I'm an IT Manager and stand-alone agent for our company's helpdesk. If and end-user get's a potential spam or other malicious email, they want me to evaluate it or provide advice. How can they send that email to me without it going to Suspended tickets. The problem is if I'm offsite, or the employee is offsite, I can't walk over to the employee's computer and look at it there.
Hi Ron, Zendesk can not be used very effectively to transmit malicious emails. We do everything in our power to suspend or reject those. If they are only spammy then they can be sent but they will land in the suspended queue, where they can be recovered and viewed by you. If they contain malicious files then they may be rejected. You might want to create a system in which the eml file could be uploaded to a fileshare service so that a link can be sent that would contain the eml file, where you could recover it to examine. That link should be able to be processed into a ticket normally. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
Hi,
We get a huge number of "Received from Support Address" from suspended tickets and I'm not sure why - I added our incoming email addresses that users can submit through via the "Connected through Google" option. These include:
support@mycompany.com
premium-support@mycompany.com
I thought I would be able to change the reply-to to something else to avoid getting so many suspended tickets, but it doesn't look like I can customize that separately. If i want to continue using these email addresses as our support channels, what can i change so they will be suspended less?
Am I suppose to create a Zendesk email address and forward all the Google emails to there somehow, or have users reply to a Zendesk email rather than our Gmail?
Hey Hannah,
If the reason is "Received from Support Address" then you would need to change the who is sending the email to your support address before a ticket is generated. Most likely this would need to be taken care of on your email providers side.
The reason these are getting suspended is because otherwise you would have email looping.
The sender should be the requester of the ticket and not the support address you've set up.
Let me know if that doesn't make sense.
Thanks!
Hi Brett,
Thanks for getting back to me! We use gmail as our email system, but we have a Google suite custom domain. Does this mean that the person emailing support@mycompany.com is email *from* support@mycompany.com?
For example, we email you at youremail@gmail.com an ad from our email address, ads@mycompany.com, for something you want to unsubscribe from. You click "reply" on that email, which sends the email to support@mycompany.com saying 'I want to unsubscribe!.
Does Zendesk perceive this email as being sent from "support@mycompany.com" or "ads@mycompany.com"?
Could I solve this by asking our email administrator to change the reply-to email on this somehow? Do you have specific language i should include in my request?
Hey Hannah,
That's most likely the case if the reason for suspension is "Received from Support Address". You can find a full list of your support addresses under Admin>Channels>Email.
It's possible the forwarding rule is set up incorrectly so you definitely want to get your email admin involved. They'll either want to check the forwarding rule or see if they can change who is sending the email back to your Support Address so it's no longer getting suspended.
Hope this helps!
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