| Announced on | Migrated on |
| March 19, 2021 | May 10, 2021 |
What's changing?
On May 10, 2021 Zendesk is migrating all email side conversation recipients to the main end-users directory. This will enable full control (editing, deletion, and so on) over the recipients that appear in the To: field for email side conversations.
Previously, the contact information for email side conversation recipients who were not existing end users or team members was placed in a simple, non-editable, opaque cache for autocompletion. While this added the convenience of not having to type in addresses every time, it also introduced problems because you could not edit or remove these recipients without having to submit a support ticket. For example, if a typo was made in an email address, it was difficult to remove.
This migration will introduce new end users for all cached recipient email addresses that are not associated with existing end users. If you have a lot of side conversation-only recipients, this could result in a large influx of new end users in your account. Because this is a migration of existing side conversation recipients, they will not receive a welcome email when they are created as end users.
What do I need to do?
To help track this, Zendesk will tag the new users if your account has tags enabled on users and organizations. This task is recommended, but not required.
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To ensure tags on users in enabled, follow the instructions in this article: Enabling user and organization tagging. You can do this anytime in advance of the May 10th migration date.
With this enabled, starting on May 10th, the newly-created users will be tagged with created_for_side_conversation and available in the People tags screen.
Clicking the created_for_side_conversation tag will list all users brought over during the migration, making it easy to view, edit, or delete any of them.
It's important to remember that, while you can delete a user to prevent them from appearing in the recipient autocompleter, then you can't display their information in any existing side conversations they were involved in. Their name will instead appear as [Deleted user].
What happens after the migration?
After the migration, whenever you add a new recipient's email address to a side conversation, they will be added as users. However, they will not receive the email inviting them to sign in and create an account. Also, if you have Tags on users and organizations enabled, you can periodically search for these users to view, edit, or delete them. As before migration, there are no restrictions on which email addresses you can include in a side conversation. They don't have to be existing users in the account. See Creating side conversations.
7 Comments
After this migration, will newly added side conversation emails create users? Will those new folks receive a welcome email? If they would, how can we disable that? We use side conversations for vendor emails and those users don't need to log into our Zendesk instance.
Hello @...,
Please note that that this announcement refers only to the side-conversations recipients who were NOT already existing as an agent/end-user in a system, so in the case of existing light agents, this does not apply.
However, I would still recommend that you follow the above instructions, just in case you have some end-users that are NOT light agents.
Hope that makes sense!
Can agents still send side conversations to emails that aren't setup as a contact in zendesk already? Currently agents can email any address without them having to exist within zendesk. Since there are role base restrictions on user creation would those settings inhibit users from emailing outside parties through side conversations?
Many of our agents use side conversations with vendors. Do you know if that creates an account for the vendors?
Hello @...,
I just saw that this was already migrated, so you probably already saw the change.
So if you have any new users that seemed 'created out of nowhere' on the 10th of May, this is most probably the reason why.
Hi Zendesk
If we by now in our setup for side conversations ONLY use recipients that are already created as light-agents, will this then have any influence for us?
We only communicate with light-agents in side conversation and thereby never create new users in the side conversation window. I'm just not sure, if we still ought to enable the setting for "tag on users and organisations"?
Hey all, thanks for the questions!
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