Customer emails don't show up in Zendesk

Question

Customer ticket replies are not being received by my Zendesk account. I can see them in my external email account but do not reach us, why is this?

Answer

There are a variety of reasons that prevent an email message from a customer from being visible in your account.

If you just configured your email in Zendesk, it could be related to your initial setup. Click on the button below and select your subdomain to go through our in-product guide for further assistance.

.zendesk.com

If everything was working fine and suddenly stopped working, then follow the troubleshooting steps in this article to find a solution.

Check your email settings

Support addresses with a custom domain must appear in your Email settings. If you do not see the address on that page, add it. For more information, see this article: Forwarding incoming email from your existing email address to Zendesk Support.

Check your forwarding configuration

To check forwarding configuration

In Admin Center, click the Channels icon () in the sidebar.
Select Talk and email > Email.
Under Support addresses, check if the address listed is verified or, showing the error Forwarding check failed.

For more information on email forwarding, see the articles: 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 can be suspended that are not necessarily spam, some examples include:

Automated response mail
Email loops
Email from a "noreply" email address

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

Note: If the email was suspended by your external email domain then it will not be forwarded to Zendesk. Check the external email domain's spam folder for the email marked as spam. To recover it, see the article: 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 are a way to organize your tickets by grouping them into lists based on certain criteria. Those criteria are determined by the conditions you set when creating the view. If the ticket no longer appears in your views, likely, the tickets don't match the conditions set for the view.

One of the most common issues with view configurations is conditions being too restrictive. This occurs most often because of confusion as to when to use meet all or meet any conditions. For more information on these categories, see the article: What is the difference between "meet all" and "meet any" conditions?

For more information on why tickets may not be appearing in your view, see the article: Why are tickets missing from my views?

Check your triggers

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

For more information, see the articles: 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 response will update the existing ticket but the ticket will not include the response as a ticket comment. When this happens the ticket will appear to not have a response.

an image of the delimiter in an email

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

Check if email was sent to an alias

Zendesk does not support the use of email aliases. Deliverability issues are common with these forms of email. To avoid these issues, use a standard email address as your support address.

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

Still having issues?

To connect with Zendesk Customer Support, see the article: Contacting Zendesk Customer Support.

Providing the information below will be helpful to the troubleshooting process:

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

For more information, see the article: