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How can I stop my emails from going into my customer's spam folder?



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Ryan Winkler

Zendesk Product Manager

Edited Feb 09, 2024


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29 comments

Some of our emails are still going into customers spam folder even after setting verification up as described in the article.  Could we change out responses to members from Zendesk to go out from a different email? Is there any downside in doing it? Wondering if this could help?

Wondering if anyone has done it and reported any positive/ negative effects? We’d still have the same support email linked to Zendesk so we’d get all the email replies to this email address, but would respond back from a different email. Would the member's experience receiving a response be weird/different?

 

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Russell Chee

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Sandy,

I hope you are doing well and taking care of yourself! I just wanted to let you know that I'll be creating a ticket from this community post and converse with you via that avenue to discuss your questions and options to help stop your messages from Zendesk arrive into customer's spam folders. Speak soon!

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Just adding to the list of folks having issues sending emails to users with the gmail domain. Tested yahoo and protonmail in addition and the emails sent to their inbox. Gmail is the issue. @... did you get any further response from your ticket? 

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I'm also having this issue - many of our outbound emails are ending up in spam when using Zendesk Gmail Connector

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Russell Chee

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Manaan,
Thanks for reaching out on the community post, I hope you are doing well!
I just wanted to let you know that I'll be creating a ticket with you so we can work on this issue together. Keep an eye out for your emails and speak soon!

Russell Chee | Senior Customer Advocacy Specialist | Melbourne, Australia

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Many of my customers are using Microsoft 365 and a lot my outgoing support mail to these customers are ending up in their spam filter. I never got it solved as Zendesk asked me to get my customers to add my support e-mail address in their whitlist which is not an option.

My customers write to support@mycompany.dk and I reply on the same one. If it was possible to always reply from support@mycompany.zendesk.com it would maybe help.

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I am also having the same issues with Zendesk. We checked our domain spam score and it is fine. We also implemented DKIM however customers are still missing emails.

My emails are going to spam and it has been a recurring issue. We have some customers missing important emails like mockup approvals and in some situations, it has caused us to not be able to convert on orders so it is quite critical and a requirement that our emails from Zendesk land in an inbox. 

From what I am gathering it seems to be a Zendesk specific problem with sending to Gmail. Gmail is quite a popular platform so it would be great to have this fixed asap.

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DJ Buenavista Jr.

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Eddison,
 
Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
 
In regards to your concern, your email is directed to your customer's spam folder because the customer's email system doesn't trust the sender. To improve the chances of a successful delivery, use a combination of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify the trustability of your outgoing emails. When you set up SPF and DKIM, include Zendesk within the records to authorize sending from your account.

If issues persist, consider asking your end users to contact their mail providers to find out specifically why their system marked it as spam.
 
You can also try to correct the problem by adding these customers to your allowlist. For information see the article: Using the allowlist and blocklist to control access to Zendesk Support.
 
Thank you!
 
 
 
Kind regards,

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This issue is still persisting for me. By the looks of it, it seems like the issue is common for other folks as well. When I reached out Russel mentioned that it was due to my Gmail app connector. 

I reached out to several Zendesk customers within this thread and they are all using different email providers. One is using Microsoft 365 and is experiencing the same issue. 

This is seems to be clearly a Zendesk issue. Can someone please look into this further? 

It seems like with this issue a core functionality of Zendesk is not being met since our emails are not going through.

Thanks,

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Eddison! If you are using the Zendesk Gmail Connector with the Send email via Gmail option selected on the Email Settings page in your Zendesk, then Gmail is responsible for the outbound sending from your Zendesk. In that scenario, Gmail would be responsible for your outbound Zendesk notifications going to your customer's spam folder.

To resolve, you can either reach out to Gmail or you can uncheck the Send email via Gmail option so that Zendesk is responsible for the outbound sending. (Note that when Zendesk is responsible for the outbound sending you will no longer see your notifications in the Sent Items folder of your Gmail mailbox.)

If Send email via Gmail is already unchecked and you have SPF and DKIM correctly set up, then we can investigate this further by looking at specific ticket examples and taking this issue into a ticket. Thanks!

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Hey Bonnie,

Thanks for sending that over, it makes sense to me. It was enabled to Zendesk sending the mail, which confirms my original suspicion that there are issues with deliverability with Zendesk and it is in fact not my own domain being the problem.

I just changed it so that it sends from Gmail, so I will be monitoring to see if there are any improvements in spam. I have a feeling that this should solve it. 

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Eddison, you're very welcome! We also investigated the SPF and DKIM setup on your domain for when you were sending with Zendesk and added our findings to your current open ticket. We did see an issue with the DKIM setup which we described in the ticket.

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We are having the same issue as reported above. Many of our customers using o365 are not receiving our emails. Can someone at Zendesk please help? It seems to be getting worse. 

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Same here and it is absolutely crippling. All mail to MS and gmail go to spam. Adding the ability to relay through a service like SendGrid would solve the issue and maintain company domain vs gmail.

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Looking at the headers from an email sent from our zendesk support to a gmail account, this appears to be a "SPF Softfail Domain Does Not Designate IP as Permitted Sender" issue, originating with a aws/zendesk IP.

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;

       dkim=pass header.i=@zendesk.com header.s=zendesk1 header.b=w0LHMo47;

       spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning support@my_company.com does not designate 192.161.149.37 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=support@ my_company.com;

If this there is something on our end that we can do to solve this issue, please advise. Thank you in advance for your prompt attention to this urgent issue. Please fix this ASAP!

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hello Chris and Charlie! You should confirm that the Zendesk entry of include:mail.zendesk.com is added in the SPF record for your external support address domain or domains. Having the Zendesk entry added to the SPF record for your support address domain is the most crucial thing to set up in order to improve outbound email deliverability from Zendesk. If SPF is set up correctly and you are still experiencing deliverability issues, then Outbound DKIM as described in this article Digitally signing your email with DKIM should be set up. 

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We're seeing this as well. It seems to have gotten much worse recently. We use the GMail connector for outgoing emails and can confirm we have valid SPF, DKIM *AND* DMARC settings. And it STILL goes directly to Yahoo's spam folder (AOL about the same). This is the header in a Zendesk email sent to my Yahoo test account.

Received-SPF: pass (domain of itxpress.biz designates X.X.X.X as permitted sender)
Authentication-Results: atlas212.free.mail.bf1.yahoo.com;
 dkim=pass header.i=@itxpress.biz header.s=ussems;
 spf=pass smtp.mailfrom=itxpress.biz;
 dmarc=pass(p=NONE) header.from=itxpress.biz;

I completely understand this is somewhat out of Zendesk's hands - despite everything passing, they still mark is as Spam. But we never had this much trouble with our ticket emails getting seen before (thankfully we send SMS texts when a ticket is solved, so we often get a call asking if the problem is solved). 

Is it possible something in the way emails are getting composed is causing this? Yahoo even alerts that it has disabled links in the email (though helpfully provides a link to activate them and suggests clicking 'Not Spam'). 

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Mike! If you're using the Gmail Connector and have the Send email via Gmail option selected in Zendesk, then Gmail's email servers are responsible for your outbound sending rather than Zendesk's email servers. We would not be able to troubleshoot that issue as Gmail is the sender.

If you would like to try having Zendesk's email servers send your outbound emails instead, please uncheck the Send email via Gmail option. Then, your Zendesk SPF and DKIM settings will be used and we can troubleshoot any issues you have if your messages still go to spam. Note that when the Send email via Gmail option is unchecked, you will no longer see your outbound notifications in the Sent Items folder of your Gmail support address mailbox.  

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While I understand that - my point in sending the headers I did is that it probably is NOT due to GMail connector and possibly due to the way the emails are encoded, etc that are triggering Spam filters. We don't have any trouble reaching people directly via GMail on Yahoo and AOL. We use GMail connector precisely because we've had pristine SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup and rely on deliverability of it that way. But Zendesk emails are consistently marked SPAM, even though SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are all passing on Yahoo's side, as the headers show. 

So please don't do the 'oh some other company is involved so it's definitely their problem' bit. It's clearly not a GMail issue given Yahoo verifies every anti-spam setting/feature and marks it passed (See above). I send email directly from the same address to the same Yahoo address and it delivers fine.

Is there any way for Zendesk to reach out to Yahoo to enquire as to why emails like this are being flagged? Clearly a number of users are experiencing it. Is it the [] prefix in the subject? The ## Please reply above this line ##. The keyword Zendesk? I checked the headers between successful and marked emails - they are almost identical in terms of which headers are included - as you'd expect. Hopefully you all can help us troubleshoot this to get our ticket emails reliably delivered. We're having to waste so much time following up with users by phone now, or hoping SMS alerts on ticket resolution get through because this is breaking communication with a significant segment of our customers that still use these email services.

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Mike! I apologize, but I don't believe we have a way to contact Yahoo regarding this. I think the most efficient solution here would be for you to uncheck the Send email via Gmail option on your Zendesk Email Settings page so that Zendesk's email servers can be responsible for the sending. When you do this, you will still be using the Gmail Connector to bring in incoming tickets; the difference is that Zendesk's email servers will be responsible for the outbound sending. I have created a ticket for you in case you have any follow-up questions regarding this.

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I'm also having the same issue. Tried unchecking "send email via gmail", Zendesk support team confirmed my SPF, DKIM are set up correctly AND our emails are still popping up in spam/promotions folders. This wasn't always an issue - I've seen an increase over the last couple of weeks in the number of customers who aren't responding to our emails OR emailing back in saying "why haven't you responded". Reading through the comments, the issue seems to be pretty common and it appears to be a Zendesk issue not a ESP issue. We need a fix ASAP. We're losing business/providing a terrible CX. 

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Jimmy! I logged into your account and I see an issue with the SPF record for your domain that would definitely be causing these outbound email deliverability issues. I will follow up with details via a ticket.

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Hi Bonnie, We're having the same issue. Really need some help here. Thanks!

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Paul - 

This sounds like an issue for which you should contact support, as they'll need to look at your account specifically (as Bonnie had to do to help Jimmy.) 

Here's how to get in touch with them: Contacting Zendesk customer support

 

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Same problem here, email send by zohodesk are flagged as spam. The problem is the subdomain for the organization doesn't have DKIM setup properly be looking at this screenshot from gmail. Also no trace of DKIM in the headers.

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey André,
 
Have you had a chance to contact our Customer Care team using the instructions Nicole shared above in her comment?
 
They should be able to help further after taking a look at your account.
 
Let me know!

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Hi Bonnie @... Brett Bowser

This is also an issue for us. One of our departments had to suspend their use of Zendesk because of it. We have timely items that if the requester does not get confirmation they lose the deal entirely. We had them on for one day and they've asked to remove Zendesk because of this. 

 

I have SPF DKIM and DMARC set up and DKIM is passing on the https://dmarcian.com/dkim-inspector/ tool. but in the email headers says fail on the first half then a few lines down says pass. I reached out to customer support which did not provide anything prudent as they just referred me to this article instead. Bonnie mentioned in earlier replies that she can open a ticket and they can look in it. I have my account assumption set up and need someone to assist asap.

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Noelle,
 
What I can suggest on this situation is to determine first what could be causing it to be marked as spam. Most of the time, it will have the message below. If that happens, you can try to remove the links that has your domain on it. It is also an indication that the issue is entirely with your domain/email provider like what has been discussed on your ticket. 
 
One more thing to try is to create a test email using your internal Zendesk support address, email@subdomain.zendesk.com. Make sure that the test email reply will not contain any link related to your domain. There's a possibility that it will not be marked as spam which will indicate that the issue is with your domain health/reputation.
 

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Having this same issue. Have already reached out to Zendesk Support about getting this resolved. This not only hurts our agents CSAT but it more importantly impedes our ability to communicate with our end users. This is the whole purpose we use Zendesk. Excited to see a better resolution to this issue. 

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