When the From and Reply-to addresses in an incoming ticket reply do not match, and the Reply-to address is the email address of an agent in your Support account, Zendesk Support automatically suspends some agent abilities until an administrator confirms the agent’s identity and manually restores those abilities.
In this article, we’ll explain how the Reply-to and From email addresses are identified in an email, what happens automatically when a conflict is discovered involving an agent’s email address, and how you can restore an agent’s suspended abilities.
This article includes the following sections:
Understanding suspension criteria and suspended abilities
When a user looks at an email notification from their email client, they often see multiple email addresses in the message. The From and Reply-to address are not always the same.
If an incoming ticket reply has conflicting From and Reply-to email addresses, and the Reply-to address is an agent, Zendesk takes the following actions:
- Flagging the ticket
- Suspending agent abilities
Flagging the ticket
When a ticket is flagged, a warning icon appears on the ticket in the ticket UI. You can hover over the icon to view more information. The ticket is not flagged in any ticket views – it only appears in the ticket interface.
Suspending agent abilities
Zendesk suspends certain abilities belonging to the user whose email address is in the Reply-to field. See Automatically suspended abilities for more information.
If suspended, agents will no longer be able to:
- Change ticket properties.
- Add or remove CCs or followers from the ticket.
- Execute Mail API actions.
- Attach files to the ticket, if end users are not allowed to do so. Attempted attachments are dropped and are not added to the ticket.
Suspended agents will still be able to:
- Forward emails to create new tickets. However, related comments will be flagged.
- Submit new tickets, even when ticket submission is restricted.
Restoring agent abilities
If the From/Reply-to conflict is not considered a security risk, you can restore the agent's suspended abilities by adding their email address or domain to the allowlist. If you do not trust the From email address, you can add that email address or domain to the blocklist.
To add an address or domain to the allowlist or blocklist
- In Admin Center, click the People icon (
)
in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users. - In
the Anybody can submit tickets section,
enter
the agent's email address or domain to the allowlist or blocklist as needed:
- Allowlist: All support requests from an email address or domain are accepted.
- Blocklist: All incoming support requests from the email address or domain are suspended or rejected, depending on your allowlist and blocklist settings.
- Click Save tab at the bottom of the page.
If you are blocking a user, you may want to also disable CCs (see Setting permissions for CCs and followers)).