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Managing file sending in live chat

Aimee Spanier
  • Edited
Zendesk Documentation Team

What's my plan?

Agents and visitors can share screenshots, PDFs, and other relevant files during a chat session directly from the dashboard or widget.

For information about how to share files in a chat session, see Sending files in a chat.

This article includes the following topics:

About file sharing in live chat

By default, sharing is enabled for the following file types:
  • PDF (.pdf)
  • PNG (.png)
  • JPEG (.jpeg)
  • GIF (.gif)
  • Text (.txt)

If needed, you can add more file types to the allowed list. See Adding additional file types for more information.

Note: If you're using the Mobile Chat SDK, file types other than those listed above might not open when an agent sends them to a visitor, depending on the mobile operating system and the way the customer's app is configured.

The file extension and the MIME type of the file must match for a successful upload. For example, if you change the extension on a file from a .jpg to .png without doing an explicit conversion/export, the extension becomes .png but the mime type stays .jpg. Mismatched files are considered "malformed" and are blocked.

Disabling file sharing

If you don't want agents and visitors to share any file types, you can disable file sharing completely.

To turn off file sending
  1. From the dashboard, select Settings > Account > File Sending tab.
  2. Click Off in the upper right-hand side.

  3. Click Save Changes.

Adding additional file types

You can also choose to allow additional file types by adding them to the allowed file types list. Keep in mind that certain file types, such as executable (.exe), might not be safe, so exercise caution when allowing additional file types. Also note that if you allow compressed file types, such as ZIP (.zip), you're also allowing any file types the compressed file might include.

To allow additional file types
  1. From the dashboard, select Settings > Account > File Sending tab.
  2. Select the option to allow additional file types.

  3. Enter the extensions of the additional file types you want to allow separated by a comma.
  4. Select the check box to accept the risk associated with file types you choose to accept.
  5. Click Save Changes.
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4 Comments

  • Jozsef Hajdu

    Hi, is there a possibility to allow to an agent to enable file sending in a particular chat session? On the enterprises account file sending is globally off, but there are rare cases when for a customer needs to be enabled in the chat to be able to send a file to the agent. Thanks in advance for the answer

     

    0
  • DJ Buenavista Jr.
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Jozsef,
     
    Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
     
    In regards to your concern, unfortunately, this is not possible. The following setting is set globally, either enabled or disabled. It's applied to every agent and cannot be bypassed. 
     
    I would highly encourage you to post this as product feedback on our Zendesk Chat product feedback page. This will help our devs and managers to see some of the features that our customers would like to see. 
     
    Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!
     
     
     
    Kind regards,
     
     
    0
  • Rafael Domingo

    Hi, it is possible to disable attachments just in the mobile version of the app (allowing attachments on web but not mobile)?

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    @Rafael,
     
    This feature will be for both platform. I'd recommend creating a Community post separately for that with your use case to help get more visibility and votes on the idea. Then, others can share their use cases to further drive demand for that feature. 
    0

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