Adding support email addresses for users to submit tickets

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Add support email addresses to let users submit tickets through various channels. You can use variations of your existing address or external addresses. Emails sent to these addresses become tickets, and you can set up business rules and SLA policies for them. Ensure proper forwarding for external addresses. This feature supports multibrand setups, associating tickets with the correct brand.

As described in Understanding the default email setup in Zendesk, you have one email address when you set up Zendesk Support: [e-mail]. Emails received at this address become tickets.

You can provide your users with alternative email addresses for submitting tickets. These addresses are known as support addresses. Support addresses can be either variations of your Zendesk email address or external email addresses. Any email address you want to use to receive support requests as tickets (whether it's a Zendesk address or an external address) must be added to your Zendesk as a support address. You can have up to 3000 support addresses.

Note: If you are adding support addresses for external email addresses, additional steps are required to set up forwarding from your email server to your Zendesk (see Forwarding incoming email from your existing email address to Zendesk Support).

For each support address you add, the from address will match the support address the ticket is sent to. For example, tickets sent to [e-mail] will reply from [e-mail].

This article contains the following sections:

• Adding support addresses
• Receiving email at your support addresses

Related articles:

• Understanding the support address end-user experience
• Managing your support addresses
• Accepting wildcard email addresses for support requests

Adding support addresses

Support addresses can be either variations of your Zendesk email address or existing external email addresses, using these options:

• Connect external address Use this option to add an existing external email address.
• Create new Zendesk address Use this option to add variations of your Zendesk email address.

This section covers the following topics:

• Adding a Zendesk support address
• Adding an external support address

Adding a Zendesk support address

Zendesk addresses are variations of your original support address, [e-mail]. For example, [e-mail]. You can add additional support addresses as needed.

Note: If you want to add your own external support address, see Adding an external support address.

To add a Zendesk support address

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select Talk and email > Email.
2. Click Manage support addresses.
3. Click Add address, then select Create new Zendesk address.
4. If you have multiple brands, select the brand for the email address from the drop-down menu.
5. Enter an address you'd like to use for receiving support requests.
6. Click Save.

   The email address is added to your list of support addresses.

Adding an external support address

External email addresses are owned and maintained by you, outside of Zendesk (for example, [e-mail]). You can receive support requests at an external email address and forward the incoming email to Zendesk.

In turn, Zendesk can send email replies to your customers through your external email address. If you're using the Gmail connector, authenticated SMTP connector, or Exchange connector, sent copies of emails are stored with your external email address. Enterprise accounts can optionally turn on automatic email archiving, which allows you to send a copy of every outbound email notification to a BCC address. This BCC address should be an external email address, ensuring the archive is maintained outside of Zendesk.

If you add an external email address, additional steps are required to set up forwarding from your email server to Zendesk. For more information, see Forwarding incoming email from your existing email address to Zendesk Support.

Receiving email at your support addresses

Emails sent to any of your known support addresses become tickets in your Zendesk account. And, if you have enabled wildcard emails (see Accepting wildcard email addresses for support requests), then emails sent to any variation of your Zendesk address, regardless of whether it's a known support address, also become tickets.

Note: If an email containing more than 65,000 characters is sent to your Zendesk, the resulting ticket comment is truncated. This can sometimes happen when an email thread contains many replies, and is forwarded to your Zendesk support address.

For tickets received via email, you can see which address it was sent to at the top of the ticket.

You can set up business rules, views, and SLA policies for tickets sent to your support address by using the "Ticket: received at" condition.

If you have set up multibrand, then the ticket receives the brand associated with the support address the email was sent to (see Adding email support addresses for multiple brands).