As described in Choosing the email addresses to receive support requests, you can receive support requests at an external email address (instead of a Zendesk Support email address). To do so, you need to forward email that’s coming into your external email account (Gmail, for example) into Zendesk Support.
In addition to setting up email forwarding to use your external email address, you'll need to add your support address in Support and, optionally, add an SPF record.
Configuring email forwarding
You configure email forwarding in your own email account, not in Zendesk Support. Exactly how this is done depends on the email provider you're using. A number of email providers allow you to create email forwarding rules so that you can select the incoming mail that should be forwarded to your Zendesk account.
Zendesk Support does not support multi-forwarding, or forwarding that goes through multiple locations before being sent to the Zendesk support address. In the event that multi-forwarding is configured, the requester will be the first address that Zendesk can find in the Reply:To or From: fields in the email headers. This could produce inconsistent results and is not supported.
Follow the steps for your email provider to set up forwarding.
If you need help setting up automatic forwarding, reach out to your email provider for assistance.
Additional steps for using an external email address
After you set up forwarding in your email account, there are a couple of additional steps to complete the setup for using your external email address.
- Create a new external email-based support address in Zendesk Support (see Adding an external support address).
When you add your support address, your email will be verified and you'll know whether you've set up email forwarding properly.
- Edit or create an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to verify that Zendesk can send outgoing email on behalf of your email server (see Setting up SPF for Zendesk to send email on behalf of your email domain). This step is optional, but recommended.
You can also digitally sign the outbound email from Zendesk (see Digitally signing your email with DKIM or DMARC).
31 Comments
Hi -
We use Google Apps and have our standard support Gmail account set up to sync to Zendesk. That all works like a breeze.
However, we are looking to add a Gmail email group that is currently used by our training department to Zendesk to help streamline the conversation process. We've configured the forwarding settings following the directions linked to in this article but the forwarding checks continue to fail on the Zendesk side. Is this something Zendesk can help solve or is this something I would need to follow up with Google about?
Thanks!
Hey, Phil -
We don't currently have strong support for Google Groups. We don't really recommend using a google group as a support address, since it adds lots of confusion to who has received what emails, and opens up the possibility of mail loops that we can't always prevent. For example, what happens if someone else in the group is a CC on the ticket?
I'm not sure why the forwarding detection isn't working (it should in theory). Have you reached out to our support team?
Thanks Max. I haven't contacted support yet, as I thought I would start here for answers and see what the community had to share.
Those are good points about the Google Group and we'll definitely take that into consideration. The email loop is a large part of the reason we wanted to bring it into Zendesk to provide some level of tracking capability.
Thanks for the response.
Hi Phil,
Currently I'm using Google Group support e-mail to receive all incoming requests. From our side that's done in order we don't lose any e-mail sent from customer, and by the way, our developers are monitoring requests in the e-mails.
Configuring Google Group for Zendesk works similar to the regular gmail forwarding, just subscribe support@yourdomain.zendesk.com to the group you use (supposedly support@yourdomain.com) and configure SPF for it (still I'd recommend setting up DKIM as well).
After that everything would work without any problems (except you'll get duplicated notifications from Zendesk that a new ticket appears.
Hi there,
I have perhaps a unique situation, where all I want is for the initial email that is sent when a user is created to be sent from a different email address. I specifically do not want that address to forward to Zendesk, but i would like all outgoing Zendesk emails to use that address. Is this possible?
Hey, David -
That does seem unique to me. What's the reason behind this? If we send an email and populate the From and Reply-to headers with your email address, but you don't forward those emails to us, how do the replies keep the ticket conversation going?
The idea came after I added coworkers as end users, and they received the email to create a password and log in. Our IT man thought it was a virus and told everyone not to open it.
The idea was to have the welcome mail come from a familiar email address to avoid this situation for future users. And since this is an email that no one needs to respond to, it shouldn't make a difference.
Hey, David -
It should come from one of your own addresses if you set up a default support address. Other than that, no, we won't send any email from an address that you haven't forwarded to us. Something to think about for sure, but right now it hasn't come up from anywhere else.
Hi, would the "Custom Domain for DKIM" option help us here?
I'll emphasize again that we are not interested in having tickets created when emails come to the external address, but we would like it to be the "From" address when we send out messages from Zendesk.
Hi, David -
No, that wouldn't do anything to allow us to send on your behalf. At the moment the only way we're set up to send email "from" your address is if you set up forwarding.
cool this accont its we have ah pro
Hi Rassel!
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're asking...could you give us more information?
I'm trying to forward emails from one of my agent's email addresses into zendesk. I've set up email forwarding in Gmail but when I try to add the email address in zendesk I get an error which says
'This email address is already being used by XXX If you want to set up forwarding you'll need to delete or update this user'.
What do you mean by update? Is it not possible to have an Agent's email address linked to Zendesk?
Thanks
Hi Nadia!
If an email address is associated with a user profile, it cannot be added as a Support Address is your Zendesk. That's why you're getting an error.
Can you share some details about your use case? Is there a reason that your agent can't manually forward those emails to your primary support address?
Hi
I did anything follow this article to change the support e-mail (support@XXX.zendesk.com) to support@mycompany.com.
However, when user received email from zendesk support, the mail support@doman.zendesk.com is still displayed. Only the name of email change from domain to mycompany and that's all.
Please help me
Many thanks.
Hi Autumn!
It sounds like you haven't added your support address as one yet -- For the email to be used, it needs to be explicitly added as a support address under Admin >> Channels >> Email, using the "Add Address" option on the right hand side.
Here are two articles which speak to it as well:
I'll follow up in a ticket shortly to ensure everything is going alright!
The Recipient Address Map appears to be Google's preferred method: https://support.google.com/a/answer/4524505?hl=en
This is the method they link to from the individual email routing tab in the Google Apps Admin.
Hi Kat!
Are you pointing this out as something that should be updated in our documentation? I just want to make sure I understand. :)
Guys,
I'm having hard time adding our existing support email. Here's the error message I'm getting:
Hey Daniel!
Sorry to hear you're running into some issues with your email forwarding. This generally happens when the forwarding configuration on the external email side is not setup properly, but it's a bit tough to determine the cause without more context. If you're sure everything is setup properly externally but this is still not working, I would recommend sending in a ticket to support@zendesk.com along with your account subdomain. Our advocates can work with you more directly than here on the forums and find out where the issue is.
Thanks!
Hi, what if I just want to forward one email that came into my personal business email which should have gone to support? I used to be able to forward the email to support and it would create a ticket from the person who had originally sent the email. I just did it now and it just created a support ticket for myself. I dont' remember exactly how I did it before, I thought it was by forwarding. I did change my domain about 18 months ago, and I don't know if I have done it since then, maybe that has something to do with why it no longer works? Or maybe I need to do it a different way?
Basically to confirm Customer X emails my personal email instead of support email. I want to forward that email to support and have zendesk create a ticket for Customer X without seeing the Forwarding I did, to the customer it would look like she had emailed support directly.
That's what used to happen, is it still possible?
Hi Aimee, There are a few things that must happen for Agent Forwarding to work correctly - it must come from an agent's email address, must include the original sender's email address in From: field of the the body of the forwarded email, must have a Fw: in the subject line, etc. It requires us to take a look at details that are best done within a ticket. If you could open a ticket with us at support@zendesk.com so that we can take a closer look that would be helpful.
Thanks Sean, didn't know to search under Agent Forwarding - that's the challenge with help docs, you don't know what terms the writers name things. Anyway, this helped me, because I had changed my help desk domain, the email I was forwarding from no longer matched my agent address. So I changed it to forward from the agent address and it acted as expected.
Hi Aimee,
Two other ideas which might help.. you can add your personal email as an alias in your agent profile, then the forward would work.
If that doesn't work for you (and I can think of a number of reasons why it might not) what I've done is opened our public facing contact form in an incognito window, then copy & paste the request & submit on the end user's behalf. Not as convenient as forwarding, but also gets the job done.
Hope this helps!
Hi,
We have created our support address of ABC@company.zendesk.com. We have that nested inside an internal distro list (ABC@company.com) that goes to a few other internal users. When sending an email internally, the ticket is created as expected. When receiving an external email to ABC@company.com we don't see a ticket also created.
Is there any resolution for this? Or must we create that as a standard email (shared inbox) and turn on auto forwarding?
Thanks.
Hey Matt,
Distribution lists aren't actually supported as it can cause issues such as the one you're currently experiencing. Our recommendation is to create abc@company.com as a standalone email address and set that up as your Support Address to make sure emails are flowing in smoothly. You can find out more information in our Is using an email alias, distribution list, or Google group as a support address supported? article that I've attached for you.
Hope this helps!
Hi,
However, we can't use that email address in Gmail or Send Email to this address that for alternative usage -
What would be the best practice recommendation?
Is there a way to use this contact email address outside of the Zendesk helpdesk or should we create a new email address for this purpose.
I.E A staff member is using this for both Helpdesk and Sales and Internal communication.
Thanks and looking forward to your insights.
We don't want Zendesk to create new tickets from email; we want to direct users to submit a request (ticket) via the web form. However, I would like to let users reply to a ticket and forward that to Zendesk. Is there a reliable way to determine whether an email is a reply to an existing Zendesk ticket? For example, will it always have headers like:
References: <xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@zendesk.com>
In-Reply-To: <xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@zendesk.com>
If that's the case, then I can write an Exchange transport rule that searches for these headers and only forwards those to our support@mycompany.zendesk.com address. (And not deliver that to the internal users).
Hi Greg,
I replied to your post here if you want to take a look :)
Forwarding replies only with custom domain
Thanks!
We currently have an issue with this. Whenever we CC someone, they are meant to be sent an email-based notification. However, because the email address it is being sent to is automatically forwarding emails into Zendesk, nothing happens. Presumably to prevent a mail loop.
I'd like to know what the best way of handling this is so that agents using Zendesk get notified when they are CC'd on a ticket.
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