Forwarding an email message to your support address

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.

When you forward the email, the sender becomes you, not the original sender. Normally, the process creates a ticket listing you as the requester. However, you can use one of the following solutions to set the correct requester on the ticket:

• Enabling the forwarding option for agents in Zendesk Support
• Specifying the requester in the forwarded email

Use this article if you want to handle the occasional email yourself. If you want to redirect all emails sent to an email address (not just the occasional one), see Forwarding incoming email to Zendesk Support.

You can redirect email as an alternative to forwarding. Redirecting preserves the header information so that the email appears to be from the original sender, not you. A ticket is created with the original sender set as the requester.

Note: Light agents can use agent email forwarding to forward an email to your support address, which creates a ticket with a private comment. They cannot use agent email forwarding to create a ticket with a public comment.

Tip: To troubleshoot email forwarding and customer ticket replies not displaying in Zendesk, see Customer emails don't show up in Zendesk.

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.

Note: Your email address must be registered in your user profile. This feature is supported for email clients in western European languages, Hebrew, and Chinese.

To enable the forwarding option

1. Log in as an administrator.
2. In Admin Center, click Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Agent interface.
3. Scroll down to the Email forwarding section and then select Enable email forwarding.
4. 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 in the Administrator Guide.

1. Select the email in your inbox and click Forward.
2. 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 [e-mail]

   Tip: You can copy the requester's address from the Forwarded Message section in the body.

3. 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.

4. Enter your support address in the To field and click Send.