Question
Why aren't out-of-office replies appearing in the suspended ticket queue?
Answer
Many email providers are moving away from the use of out-of-office replies or they are restricting the domains and organizations to which they will use them to respond. This is in large part because these replies can be dangerous. Hackers can use them in phishing attempts to discover when people are working to improve efficiency on phishing attacks. They also represent a significant threat of creating an email loop. Because not all email systems add the headers that announce the out-of-office response is automated, this creates the potential of an email loop.
For instance, Gmail doesn't send out-of-office replies to Zendesk because they recognize Zendesk as an automated sender of traffic. Many major corporations limit their use of out-of-office replies, or they only send them to known individuals because of the potential threats they represent to security.
As part of responsible sending policies, Zendesk announces itself as an automated system that generates automated traffic and responses. The example headers below help the recipient server to decide what it should and shouldn't do:
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated X-Auto-Response-Suppress: All X-Mailer: Zendesk Mailer
For example, you can send out a single email and CC a Zendesk support address to a Gmail user that has out-of-office replies enabled. But you won't likely see their out-of-office response and it may never arrive in your queue or your suspended tickets view. Because you received it in your external email, it seems that the Zendesk account should have also received it. The behavior can also be intermittent. This is because Gmail is updating its responsiveness based only on what they know at any given time. If they don't know that the CC'd address is attached to Zendesk, then they'll send an out-of-office response, as soon as they do recognize that the address is an auto-responder, and they will cease.
This is not an issue that Zendesk can easily solve, or one they can solve entirely on their own. This is because a unique email header meant to be used exclusively for out-of-office replies was never established as part of the RFCs that govern automated email behavior.
For more information, see the article: Causes for ticket suspension.
3 comments
Andrew Dun
We would like out-of-office replies to show in Zendesk incidents. They are worthwhile for agents to be aware of. We have had a customer who was unhappy about a follow up email, as they had an out-of-office reply turned on when the original email was sent to them from Zendesk. The agent was unaware of the out-of-office reply, as it had been suppressed. Is there any way to configure Zendesk to set the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header value to None?
2
Tim Schempp
From the sounds of this post, out of office responses are becoming less of an issue. Then why have the policy basically search for the phrase "out of office"? Trying to understand the idea behind a basic filter of a phrase if the filter isn't even 100% effective?
0
Sanchez, Santiago
Hi,
I'm going to add to this here to see if it gets any traction. We just started using Zendesk and this became an issue on day 2 when a user sent an email with out of office in the subject. The request was to set up the OOO message for another user.
Does anyone have any workaround? Zendesk's response to me equates to us having to tell our users to not use OOO in an email sent to us.
The fact that it isn't even doing a great job at filtering message out makes this an even sillier issue to deal with:)
Thanks,
Santiago
1