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If the From and Reply-to email addresses in a ticket reply conflict, and the Reply-to is an agent, agent abilities are suspended until verified. You can restore abilities by adding the email to the allowlist. If the Reply-to is an end user, the ticket is flagged without suspending abilities.
When the From and Reply-to addresses in an incoming ticket reply do not match, and the Reply-to address is the email address of an agent, Zendesk automatically suspends some agent abilities until an admin confirms the agent’s identity and manually restores those abilities.
If the From and Reply-to addresses are different, and the Reply-to address is a known end user, no user abilities are suspended. Instead, the comment is flagged and a warning appears letting you know that the From and Reply-to in the messages do not match.
This article explains how the conflict is identified in an email, what happens when there's a conflict, and how you can restore an agent’s suspended abilities.
This article includes the following sections:
Understanding suspension criteria and suspended abilities
When a user looks at an email notification from their email client, they often see multiple email addresses in the message. The From and Reply-to address are not always the same.
If an incoming ticket reply has conflicting From and Reply-to email addresses, and the Reply-to address is an agent, Zendesk takes the following actions:
- Flagging the ticket
- Suspending agent abilities
Flagging the ticket
When a ticket is flagged, a warning icon appears on the ticket in the ticket UI. You can hover over the icon to view more information. The ticket is not flagged in any ticket views – it only appears in the ticket interface.
Suspending agent abilities
Zendesk suspends certain abilities belonging to the agent whose email address is in the Reply-to field, including the ability to:
- Change ticket properties.
- Add or remove CCs or followers from the ticket.
- Execute Mail API actions.
- Attach files to the ticket, if end users are not allowed to do so. Attempted attachments are dropped and are not added to the ticket.
Suspended agents will still be able to:
- Forward emails to create new tickets. However, related comments will be flagged.
- Submit new tickets, even when ticket submission is restricted.
Restoring agent abilities
If the From and Reply-to conflict is not considered a security risk, you can restore the agent's suspended abilities by adding their email address or domain to the allowlist. If you do not trust the From email address, you can add that email address or domain to the blocklist.
To add an address or domain to the allowlist or blocklist
-
In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.
-
In
the Anybody can submit tickets
section,
enter
the agent's email address or domain to the allowlist or blocklist
as needed:
- Allowlist: All support requests from an email address or domain are accepted.
-
Blocklist: All
incoming support requests from the email address
or domain
are suspended or rejected, depending on your
allowlist and blocklist
settings.
If you are blocking a user, you may want to also disable CCs (see Setting permissions for CCs and followers).
- Click Save tab.