Question
How does the email server of Zendesk handle a Reply-To:
in email headers?
Answer
The mail servers of Zendesk use the Reply-To:
line in the headers, if present, to identify the author of the email. Since the Reply-To:
line in the header indicates the mailbox to which responses should be sent, this field supersedes any data in the "From:" field.
For more information on how incoming emails thread in tickets, see the article: Why do emails thread to the wrong ticket?
Note: This
Reply-To:
header is an official email standard and Zendesk must respect that email standard: "The originator fields also provide the information required when replying to a message. When the "Reply-To:" field is present, it indicates the address(es) to which the author of the message suggests that replies be sent. In the absence of the "Reply-To:" field, replies SHOULD by default be sent to the mailbox(es) specified in the "From:" field unless otherwise specified by the person composing the reply."Zendesk will use the Reply-To:
as the originator/sender in keeping with this RFC standard. If From:
and Reply-To:
differ, Zendesk uses the Reply-To:
. This can cause unexpected behavior with emails if the sending server mishandles these headers.
4 comments
Support Team
This seem to be working fine for us, where we relay incoming messages to zendesk. In the process of relaying we changing From header (always same for all messages that arrive to Zendesk), but preserve original requester's email in Reply-To header.
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Zendesk seem to pick up correct email from the Reply-To header during Ticket creation, but we see that each new message is flagged because From and Reply-To are different. Is there a way to disable that warning?
0
Ashley M
We are having the opposite effect from the last post, warnings are not clear enough for agents to see that the from and to address are different, the reply to address does not look to be part of any validation checks and as the requester is set based on this it can this can lead to security issues.
How can we block these or have the warning more clear?
0
Sabra
Hey Ash! At this time there is not a native way to make the warning more visible. However, you can identify these types of tickets by the comment flag property of Comment object of the ticket using our API, so you could potentially build a custom solution to help your agents handle these types of tickets.
Additionally, we do recommend Authenticating incoming email (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to help combat these types of emails. If you have specific examples in your account that you would like us to take a deeper look into, please contact us through messaging!
0
Kyle Pease
Any chance we could use the "From" email in zendesk instead, as the requester by default?
Using the Reply-To has been causing us issues for years with our netsuite back end unfortunately.
0