Question

Customer ticket replies don't reach my Zendesk account. I see them in my external email account, but they don't reach me. Why is this?

Answer

Several issues can prevent a customer's email from appearing in your account.

If you just set up email in Zendesk, the issue can relate to the initial setup. Click the button below, select your subdomain, and follow the in-product guide for help.

.zendesk.com

If everything worked before and then stopped, follow these steps to find a solution.

Check your email settings
Support addresses that use a custom domain must appear in your Email settings. If you don't see the address on that page, add it. For more information, see Forwarding incoming email from your existing email address to Zendesk Support.
Check your forwarding configuration

To check the forwarding configuration:

  • In Admin Center, click the Channels icon (Channels icon) in the sidebar
  • Select Talk and email > Email
  • Under Support addresses, check if the address is verified or shows the error Forwarding check failed.
    Zendesk - Agent.png

For more information, see How to fix the email error messages on forwarding, SPF, DNS, and TXT records?

Check the Suspended tickets view

Check the Suspended tickets view. Tickets that aren't spam can be suspended. Examples include:

  • Automated response mail
  • Email loops
  • Email from a "noreply" email address
  • Emails flagged for improperly configured DMARC, DKIM, or SPF settings. This setting can flag emails from an end user if they send messages through an email provider with improper settings. When you enable enhanced sender authentication, this setting tries to block these emails as spam.

For more information, see Understanding and managing suspended tickets and spam and Causes for ticket suspension.

Note: If your external email domain suspended the email, it won't forward to Zendesk. Check the external email domain's spam folder for the email. To recover it, see How do I forward recovered emails that are incorrectly caught as spam back into Zendesk?
Check if the ticket is hidden in your account

Views organize tickets by grouping them into lists based on criteria you set. If the ticket doesn't appear in your views, it likely doesn't match the view's conditions.

A common issue is conditions that are too restrictive. This often happens because of confusion about when to use meet all or meet any conditions. For more information, see What is the difference between "meet all" and "meet any" conditions?

For more reasons why tickets may not appear in a view, see Why are tickets missing from my views?

Check your triggers

Triggers run when a ticket is created or updated and perform actions based on the configured conditions. Search your triggers and review any that contain Ticket > Ticket status | Solved or Ticket > Status category | Solved actions and make sure the corresponding Conditions are set correctly.

For more information, see Creating triggers for automatic ticket updates and notifications and Trigger conditions and actions reference.

Check if the ticket was updated without a visible response

When an end user replies to a ticket below the email delimiter, the reply updates the ticket but the ticket doesn't include the reply as a comment. The ticket can look like it has no response.

an image of the delimiter in an email

For more information, see Updated ticket does not show any content from the customer.

Check if the email was sent to an alias

Zendesk doesn't support email aliases. These addresses often cause deliverability issues. To avoid issues, use a standard email address as your support address.

For more information, see Can I use an email alias, distribution list, or Google Group as a support address?

Still having issues?

To contact Zendesk Customer Support, see Contacting Zendesk Customer Support.

Provide the information below to help the process:

  • The original email with headers intact that was sent and forwarded to your Zendesk Support account within the last 30 days. The team needs the headers to look up the message ID in email logs. To view the headers, or to download a .eml file, see Trace an email with its full headers.
  • Estimated date and time when the customer sent the email

For more information, see My custom form forwards emails to create tickets and generates errors and Customers are not receiving emails (Video).

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