Issue symptoms

Incoming tickets are being suspended with the cause: Automatic email processing failed.  What does this mean? 

suspended ticket due to Email processing error

Resolution steps

Automatic email processing failed is a suspension error that may occur for a variety of reasons. In most instances, they are considered edge cases that do not have a more specific error.

Below are some of the reasons this error is known to occur. 

  • Using the Mail API to set the #requester of a ticket to an invalid value. For example, a support address or a suspended user.
  • If a light agent sends an email and the resulting ticket update would change one of the ticket field values. This fails because light agents do not have permission to make those changes. For example, this can happen if the light agent's email includes a credit card number since credit card redaction also adds a tag to the ticket.
  • If a ticket has a value in a custom RegEx field. If the regular expression used to validate that field is altered, then any follow-up tickets will attempt to pull all custom field values into the new ticket. This results in the RegEx failing validation.
  • If there is a misalignment between the organization present on a user, and the organization-memberships linked to that user. Follow the steps below to verify if the user organization matches the organization memberships. 

Verifying user organization and membership

  1.  Open the user profile of the user listed in the From field of the email. Copy their user ID from the URL:
    user_ID_from_the_URL_of_the_article.png
  2. Take this ID and use it in the URLs listed below. Replace USER_ID_HERE with the user ID obtained from the user profile and replace the value of SUBDOMAIN with your account's subdomain:
    https://SUBDOMAIN.zendesk.com/api/v2/users/USER_ID_HERE
    https://SUBDOMAIN.zendesk.com/api/v2/users/USER_ID_HERE/organization_memberships
  3. In the first URL, look for the organization_id value:
    org_id
  4. Compare to make sure that the same organization_id value appears within the list of memberships in the second URL:
    organization_id of the organization memberships API call
  5. If the organization is not present within the listed memberships remove the organization from the user in Support, and re-add it to bring these back into alignment.
Tip: If you have difficulties reviewing the output of either of the URLs listed above, copy the output returned by these URLs and paste it into a third-party JSON validation tool, like JSONLint.
This provides you with a more readable output of the data returned by these URLs.

For more information on ticket suspension, see the article: Causes of ticket suspension.

Powered by Zendesk