Question
How can I send Zendesk email notifications to secondary emails?
Answer
Support sends emails to the primary email address. The secondary email addresses are used to identify user accounts, but outgoing email ticket updates are sent to the primary email address.
Note: If the primary email is determined undeliverable, Zendesk will attempt to send ticket updates to the secondary email address. For more information, see our Developer documentation: Deliverable state.
As a workaround, create email target that represents a secondary email address and use that target in your triggers and automations. This is only recommended for limited use as it is not a scalable alternative. For more information, see the article: Creating webhooks in Admin Center.
14 Comments
@... pls don't mind that I've added a cross link to an existing feature request.
It also had 20 upvotes already. With not much effect, unfortunately. You can find it here: https://develop.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360034441633-Send-email-notifications-to-secondary-emails-in-Support (created by @...)
Cheers
Oliver
It really isn't that difficult Zendesk. After all these years, it's shocking you haven't managed to fix this issue.
Our users have multiple email addresses on their account and the replies to tickets should, at the very least go to all email addresses and ideally go to the one address they used to create the ticket.
Not really acceptable 5 years after this silly "workaround" was written.
We've been burned by this setup multiple times. User sends us an urgent email from a secondary address. We reply immediately and the reply is sent to their primary address and the user doesn't see it. User gets upset that we ignored them. We look like idiots when we have to explain to the user "well we sent you a reply but not to the address you initiated the ticket from."
We're going to end up writing a webhook that checks for this on our incoming ticket.
When a user sends in a ticket via email, we will check to ensure that the email used to create the ticket is set as the user's primary email address, if it isn't already.
We shouldn't have to do this. It's ridiculous.
This is a great example of ZD getting locked into their original core technology without thinking about their actual users as they grew bigger and bigger. We've been using ZD for many years (something like 8 or so), and I've been repeatedly disappointed by their slow migration towards being a huge, uncaring company. I feel like I'm not listened to anymore and their weird little design flaws are super annoying. We've had to hack and compromise quite a lot (in system configuration and our own app design) just to make this whole system work for us. This email thing is a big one that we struggle with constantly. The idea that users have a "primary" email address is absolutely ridiculous. Come on ZD, get with the program.
I would not want to attempt a black-box analysis on ZD's internal processes, but this is indeed a long-standing (9 years with us) source of friction and pain, and this workaround is really not an acceptable solution.
Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you know that I've spoken with our product team – this is something that is on their radar, and they are planning on having more internal discussions about it next year. Follow this post for updates: Send Email Notifications to Secondary Emails in Support
That's nice Dave but nearly 9 years later for some of the comments, I truly don't believe that anything is going to be done. All you've said is that they're "planning" on having "internal discussions" about it "next year".
The most uncommitted answer if I've ever seen one.
To be honest, Zendesk engineers should be really embarrassed to not have sorted this out after all this time. There's obviously an unwillingness by the team to sort this out due to the underlying code base.
Looks to also impact our Shopify app - it wont display details as the customer bought on one email and then did a contact us using a different one. app not smart enough to determine the user has two emails and check for both? Personally I still believe there is a way to do it as I cant believe this standard use case isnt in play? As for the above . . .
We find it interesting that the date on this post now reflects when it was updated (not when it was created), and the comments have been truncated to begin in Feb 2021. This issue has been going on since before March 2022 and many of the older comments are missing from the thread. Are we trying to make it look like this is a more recent request? Because it's not. Our company started using Zendesk in 2020 and this particular post was 4 years old at that time!
I agree with the previous comments. We have a lot of users that use multiple email addresses and need to be able to reply to them from the one they sent in and also select one to reply based on their preferences.
We would like the ability to CC accounts when sending emails, it would be most efficient if you would consider this a priority for the development team.
I understand how important this feature is for your workflow. However, the actual capability to send notifications to secondary emails is still not available. Aside from the workaround provided in this article, I can't think of any other option on how to do it.
Our Product Managers and Developers uses post like this with high engagement for our development planning. We can only hope that this will be added in the near future.
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