If your customers occasionally send support requests to your email address instead of your support address, you can forward the email to the support address. By forwarding the email, a ticket is created with the original sender set as the requester. It also creates a new account if the user isn't registered.
Use this article if you want to handle the occasional email yourself. If you want to forward all emails sent to an email address (not just the occasional one), see Forwarding incoming email from your existing email address to Zendesk Support.
Enabling the forwarding option for agents in Zendesk Support
Your administrator can enable an option that lets you forward an email in your inbox to your support address to create a ticket on behalf of the original sender.
Forwarding works for ticket creation, not ticket updates. Once a ticket has been created, users should reply directly from their email notifications.
Forwarding is only configured to look at the From field in the body of the forwarded message. When an agent forwards an email and forwarding is enabled in the account, the forwarded email will not contain the original list of CCs (copied users) that may have been included on the ticket notifications.
When a non-restricted agent creates a ticket using agent forwarding, the ticket is unassigned. When a restricted agent creates a ticket using agent forwarding, the ticket will initially be assigned to their default group. Any group routing that would normally occur as a result of the requester's organization is ignored.
To enable the forwarding option
- Log in as an administrator.
- In Admin Center, click
Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Agent interface.
- Scroll down to the Email forwarding section and then select Enable email forwarding.
- Click Save.
Agents can add public comments to the ticket by replying to the email. To add private comments, agents can type the comment above the Forwarded message line.
Specifying the requester in the forwarded email
This solution works for all email clients. It involves inserting a simple instruction in the email body that specifies the requester. When creating the ticket, Zendesk Support reads the instruction and sets the requester you specified.
The solution works only if you're an agent and your email address is registered in your account. The command is ignored if the email is forwarded by an end-user. For more information, see Updating ticket properties from your inbox.
- Select the email in your inbox and click Forward.
- Enter the following instruction at the top of the email body:
#requester {requester_email}
where
{requester_email}
is the requester's email address. Example:#requester gerry5@yahoo.com
Tip: You can copy the requester's address from the Forwarded Message section in the body.
- Clean up the email. For example, remove the FWD prefix in the subject line and the
Forwarded Message header in the body.
The requester instruction will be stripped from the ticket automatically.
- Enter your support address in the To field and click Send.
25 comments
Amy
How can I forward emails from Microsoft Exchange to Zendesk? The content was removed from the page link provided: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/216954207
0
Ray
Hi Amy!
Unfortunately we do not have an article about forwarding from Microsoft Exchange specifically but we do have this one that describes how the forwarding process works: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203663316-Passing-an-email-to-your-support-address
Ultimately it is up to you your email client for what the forwarding settings are on that side.
Cheers!
Ray Roth
Senior Customer Advocate
0
Ben
I am having an issue I can't figure out.
1. Inside Zendesk if I create a new ticket for a customer manually it works great and emails the client as expected.
2. If I forward an email into Zendesk that someone sent to my personal work email, it sends the end requester a blank email when I do this. I know this is tied to the trigger for #1, but I don't know how to adjust the trigger to do #1 but not send on #2. On #2 I need the email to go in silently for the client, as then we will come back in the ticket to respond.
Any advice? Here is the trigger for #1, that also seems to catch #2...
0
Joyce
Hi Benjamin!
When you forward an email to Zendesk from your personal email, the end-user will automatically be set as the requester of that ticket. Due to our outbound email rules, it is not possible to include a customer's message in the initial auto-reply back to them. This was possible before but this functionality was targeted by spammers to pass messages through Zendesk systems to your customers. Because of this, we have made some security changes to our outbound email rules to guard against this behavior.
This is also discussed in this article: Can I include the customer's original message in my auto-reply email trigger?
Hope this helps!
1
Mags
Hi, looking for assistance. We recently sent two seperate emails using Outlook copying one of our Zendesk support groups. As the email content was templated, for the second email, we deleted the initial addressee and add the new one. Zendesk combined both emails into the one ticket. Can you advise how this occured please? I've raised here as assumed the second email might have followed a redirecting path. Thank you
0
Jupete Manitas
Hi Mags, thanks for writing in! May we know if you have submitted a ticket to Support about this for further troubleshooting? As it seems you have a different workflow which resulted in different behavior. You're sending an email and you CC'd your support address?
0
Mags
Hi Jupete, thank you for your response. I didn't raise a support ticket as upon further review on your support pages I came across this article Why do emails thread to the wrong ticket? – Zendesk help. which explained Zendesk's threading logic requires the user to copy any pertinent email content into a brand new email and that simply deleting and adding a new email addressee to an Outlook email template already used whilst copying in Zendesk would not suffice.
0
Jupete Manitas
Hello Mags,
Yes, that is right. Zendesk threads that way when they receive emails. We're glad you found that article. Thank you!
0
Daniel Woodford
Forwarding emails using #requester {email address} generally works well (for full agents). However, when a light agent uses this technique, Zendesk sets the light agent as the requester instead of the end user. Is it possible to resolve this?
0
Gabriel Manlapig
Currently, this is an intended behavior that Mail API command "#requester" is not available for light agents. For reference, please see article below:
Using the Mail API to update ticket properties from your inbox
Unfortunately, this is one of the limitations of light agents that they cannot use the mail API to respond to notifications or create new tickets. I hope this answer your question. Thank you!
1
Noelle Cheng
Hi I have forwarding set up correctly where my inbox is going to my ZenDesk address. I’m having an issue now where if an email has attachments that contain PII, our Microsoft outlook business account if encrypting the email using Purview and we cannot read the messages because the one time passcode is being sent to the ZenDesk support address instead of our inbox. Has ZenDesk spoken with Microsoft on this? If we have to go back to our inbox to get the attachments it’s making the ability to use ZenDesk useless. If we have to go back to the email in the inbox to get the attachments then we might as well just answer from the inbox.
0
Dane
I understand your point. However, it will be advisable if this can be raised to Microsoft directly as this is a feature of their product. I have done a quick check on our resources and no similar report have been taken over yet.
0
Meilech Knopfler
when using the #requester option the email that is set as the requester also is the first line of the public comments, is there a way to not have there?
0
Karley Ullery
Hi,
We're having issues where we're mid-email conversation/thread with a client and they forward us an email chain to reference. The only way to view that email chain is to click on the three little dots and choose "view original email" this is majorly slowing us down. Anyone have info on this?
0
Steven Hampson
We have a problem where we have set our external support address to forward to a Zendesk support address, but tickets received show the requester as our external address, instead of the original requester. Is there a way that we can have it automatically show the original requester instead of our external email? I've been trying for ages and can't find a way to do this.
Thanks,
Steven.
Edit: We have Outlook rules forwarding every email instead of individual forwards.
0
Bill Brooks
Hello,
Our small company will often have a customer write directly to an agent, rather than our support address.
If the agent forwards the email to support, the ticket is created and the requester is set as expected.
However, only the requester gets the notification that a new ticket was created, and not the list of people who were in cc on the original email. Also, the cc list is stripped off so upon our reply from zendesk, we need to manually add each cc back into the chain.
If an agent forwards an email to support to create a ticket on behalf of the customer, is there a way to auto notify each person on the original cc list, as well as keep them in cc for the Agent's reply from Zendesk?
0
Dane
If the Mail API was processed successfully, all the command value should not be included on the generated ticket. Otherwise, please contact our support directly and we'll investigate further.
Hi Steven,
Manually forwarding the emails without enabling agent forwarding will result in this behavior. If this is regarding a support address that is automatically forwarding emails to Zendesk, you will need to coordinate with your email admin to determine if there are any other forwarding rules in place that could have contributed to the behavior.
Hi Bill,
Forwarding is only configured to look at the From field in the body of the forwarded message. When an agent forwards an email and forwarding is enabled in the account, the forwarded email will not contain the original list of CCs (copied users) that may have been included on the ticket notifications.
0
Nick S
Hi team, we have 'Enable Email Forwarding' selected. Are we able to run any triggers based on the Light Agent who forwards us the email? We have a few triggers set-up to automatically assign tickets based on Light Agent requesters, but as this setting changes the requester, the trigger does not run. Any ideas?
0
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Nick S,
Currently, we don't have a Trigger Condition that will allow you to use Light Agent as condition. As a workaround, I suggest adding a User Tag to your Light Agents profile so you could use the Tag as a condition for your Trigger.
![](/hc/user_images/WSogoCpL0Pzt2JwEIvjl9g.png)
![](/hc/user_images/OVanf_5_iXZoobjJ1eP1Cw.png)
![](/hc/user_images/OVanf_5_iXZoobjJ1eP1Cw.png)
For example:
Hope this helps!
0
Allen Lai | Head of CX at Otter.ai
I need help getting this to work for me. The ticket requester is under me (the agent), and the auto-response is sent to me, not to the original sender. I have "Enable email forwarding" enabled too.
0
Arianne Batiles
Hi Allen Lai | Head of CX at Otter.ai,
I would need to check your account to get more information on your setup. Hence, I created a ticket on your behalf, and I’ll continue to assist you from there. Kindly check your email for updates. Thank you!
0
Anton Maslov
It should be an option to include the person who forwards in CC, here is use-case:
1. Our Account Managers can forward request to support, ticket created with client as requestor.
2. However, AM is also interested and should be added to CC (as follower) I assume.
1
Marcus Vickers
Something to keep in mind is that when the email is forwarded to the support email and a ticket is created, the original message will be included as a public comment and any notes included in the forward by the agent will be added separately as an internal comment. If there are any triggers set to perform any actions when an update is made to a ticket that do not include criteria to specify a public comment, that internal comment will count as an update and launch any relevant triggers.
For context, we have a trigger that will assign to the first responding agent who responds via email and were not specifying that the comment should be public, so when an agent (in our case an Account Manager) forwarded a message to a support email for the support team to pick up and a ticket was generated in their group, the internal comment with the Account Manager's notes notes was recognized as an update on the ticket which activated the trigger causing the ticket to immediately be moved to “Open” and assigned to the agent who forwarded the email rather than leaving it open so the support team could assign it to a member of their team.
0
Allen Lai | Head of CX at Otter.ai
When an email is forwarded to our support address, is there any attribute I can use within a trigger to tag these tickets? I want to differentiate these tickets by adding a tag or updating one of the ticket fields. Thanks!
0
Joyce
Forwarded emails to your support address don't have an attribute that will differentiate them from the regular email tickets. However, the agent can add the Mail API command
#tags
on the forwarded email and the tag is automatically added to the ticket.0