Typically, when an end user submits a support request by email, the email becomes a new ticket. However, you can control what happens to email support requests by using the allowlist or blocklist.
For example, you can block specific users from creating tickets or suspend their tickets so you can review them first. Or, you can only allow users from a particular email domain to create tickets. See Understanding the allowlist and blocklist for usage examples, limitations, and considerations.
You must be an administrator to set the allowlist and blocklist.
This article covers the following topics:
Setting your blocklist and allowlist
Zendesk reads email headers of incoming support requests to determine whether an email should become a ticket or be suspended or rejected based on the rules you’ve configured.
To edit your blocklist and allowlist
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.
- Enter your Allowlist and Blocklist settings. See Rules for setting your blocklist and
allowlist.
You can enter up to 10,000 characters in the allowlist and blocklist fields. If you are adding multiple email addresses or domains, separate them with a space.
- Click Save tab.
Rules for setting your blocklist and allowlist
- Leave the allowlist blank to allow all users to submit tickets to your Zendesk account, except those added to the blocklist.
- Use keywords or symbols with a blocklist or allowlist entry to make the restrictions
broader or more specific:
- To block or allow an entire email domain, do not include the "@" symbol. An email domain with "@" will not be successfully added to the allowlist or blocklist.
- When using keywords, type the keyword followed by a colon with no space after
the colon (for example,
reject:megaspam.com
). Separate multiple entries with a space, and add the keyword before each entry (for example,reject:randomspammer@gmail.com reject:megaspam.com reject:spammerspace.com
). See Allowlist and blocklist usage examples. - To send support requests from specific users to the suspended tickets queue,
enter the keyword
suspend:
in front of an email address or domain list in the blocklist. - To completely block support requests from specific users, enter the keyword
reject:
in front of an email address or domain list in the blocklist. Tickets will not be added to the suspended tickets queue, and there will be no record of the ticket in your Zendesk account. - The keywords
reject:
andsuspend:
apply only to support requests and don't prevent users from creating an account. See Limitations when using the allowlist and blocklist with other Zendesk channels.
- Add a wildcard (*) in your blocklist to suspend ticket submissions from all new
users except those added to the allowlist. This sends tickets from every user not added
to the allowlist into the suspended tickets queue, preventing new users from creating
accounts.
- A wildcard in the blocklist won't prevent tickets from being created by users who already have profiles; however, blocklisting a domain or email address will. To prevent traffic from a specific user with a profile, suspend or delete the user.
- Use the keywords
suspend:
andreject:
when using wildcards to suspend most users but reject others. This applies to individual users only and not domains. If you add a full email address with either thesuspend:
orreject:
keyword, the user is suspended or rejected accordingly (unless the user already has a user profile).
- If an address or domain conflict exists between
suspend:
andreject:
, then Zendesk defaults to suspension. For example, entering * reject:gmail.com in your blocklist causes a suspension rather than a rejection because the wildcard (*) applies to all addresses and domains, which conflicts with the gmail.com reject entry.
73 comments
Dane
Raphael Busshart,
The behavior to restrict notification to suspended users is by design. As it turns out, there's no option to bypass it not unless the user will be unsuspended or there is a different email address that they are using to be added as a CC.
More information can be found in Suspending a user.
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Raphael Busshart
Dane
Shouldn't there be an automatic notification of the system? Like if I suspend or reject all emails from the domain gmail.com and someone with an email @gmail.com is sending an email to the system, shouldn't this @gmail.com email sender receive an automatic message that the email could not be delivered or something?
Otherwise the feature is not very usable in my opinion. The sender sends an email but does not know that we never received the email and we do not know that someone tried to contact us.
This is bad customer service.
Thanks for any additional infos.
1
CJ Johnson
Does adding a domain to an allowlist, up the number of tickets before an email loop is declared for the whole domain?
0
Dane
Can you further elaborate what you mean by "up the number of tickets"?
0
CJ Johnson
Dane I mean that there's a specific number of tickets that a single email address can send in to a ZD account in an hour. After a certain number, they start going to spam with the reason "email loop". Too many of those come in, and Zendesk literally stops bringing in their emails at all.
Previously, I've been told that you can increase the number before they go to spam, and subsequently stop being processed, by including the *full email* in the allowlist. I am asking if recent updates allow us to up the limit for all emails for a whole domain, instead of just for full email addresses.
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Dane
Thank you for the clarification.
As it turns out, only the full email address can be used and not the whole domain.
I hope this helps.
0
JD Trout
For those looking to have the allowlist/blocklist modified via API I have created a feature request here. Please upvote it if you care about this feature.
0
RedBullRody
Hi all,
Read the thread, but not goy my answer yet.
Can I block a domain (almost) completely, but only allow 2 or 3 e-mail addresses from that domain?
So:
block @thisdomain.com
allow person1@thisdomain.com person2@thisdomain.com
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Brett Bowser
You should be able to just add thisdomain.com under blocklist and then approve of specific email addresses in that domain by adding them directly to the allowlist.
If you do run into any issues setting this up let us know :)
0
Edwin Andermyr
Hi there, I have an issue when adding multiples values under the blocklist field, it says, separate values with a space, unfortunately it's not working, see screenshot attached:
The mails from qq.com are going to the suspended tickets, but the 163.com emails are coming through, why?
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Isabelle Judlin
Hello. Is there a way of allowing ALL emails? So none come into our suspended file?
Thanks
0
Christine
An email can be suspended for a variety of reasons. For example, one common reason is that the email is from an unregistered user when you require users to register. You can enable Anybody can submit tickets, no registration required, however, this is not a guarantee that no email will fall in the Suspended ticket view.
Email sent to Zendesk Support can be suspended or rejected. Suspended emails are often, but not always, spam. This article explains what suspended tickets are and your options for managing them.
You may check out How spam is detected in Zendesk Support and a few common causes for suspensions. Thanks!
-1
Johannes Bühler
Hi,
we would like to block any email domain (blocklist: *) but only allow the domains that are already configured on the organization.
Is this the default, or is it required to configure a domain twice within the allowlist and the organization?
Thanks
0
Dave Dyson
You would need to specify the domain in both the allowlist (in order to allow tickets to be created at all), and then also in the Organization (to allow tickets from that domain to be automatically assigned to that organization).
0
Johannes Bühler
Thanks Dave, the allowlist only supports 10'000 chars, so we might hit the limit somewhen. Are there any efforts to extent that limit or provide a setting to allow registered organizations?
0
Dave Dyson
0
Ram Moskovitz
I want to allow public access to HC, allow everyone to register for a user account, require that only registered / verified / manually-approved accounts can submit a ticket that makes it to our agents.
What's the right way to do this keeping in mind that there may be 1,000 approved ticket creators over the first few months as I rollout Zendesk powered tickets for support?
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Ram Moskovitz
You can set up your Help Center to be publicly visible but only verified/added users can submit tickets. This article describes how to set up a closed instance so that your Help Center is visible to everyone but only the users that you add to your Zendesk account can sign in and submit support requests.
Hope this helps!
0
Bex Heenan
Hi,
Is it possible to unblock/allow tickets to be created from a domain, based on the subject text? We have a lot of customers send through Remittance emails which seem to be marked as spam by Zendesk. Without unblocking each email address it's coming from (which we won't know), we can't see a way around it.
However, if we could set it up so that any with a subject containing 'remittance' was accepted, that'd be great.
Thanks
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Bex Heenan,
At the moment there is no feature to automatically unsuspend a ticket and no way for the blocklist to check on the subject line before suspending a ticket. The blocklist/allowlist only functions using the email address or email domain.
I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
0
Phil Capezio
I understand that if a ticket is suspended the requester is not notified, but what about when using the reject keyword on the blocklist? Is there any sort of delivery failed message they receive?
0
Sabra
Hey Phil Capezio! I can confirm that there is no notification or indication to the sender that the message was rejected by the account.
0
D.Fitz
We're seeing a lot of emails getting suspended due to them having 'Warning, this e-mail was sent from an external sender!' at the start of their email.
This is pretty standard practice now, but there doesn't seem to be a whitelist phrases, and it's just not viable for us to whitelist all existing and prospective customer emails or domains.
Is there any way to get around the over-sensitive filter?
0
Joyce
I created a ticket for your question so we could gather more details. Our team will further assist you via email.
0
carol jiao
Hi, I add * to a certain email in the blocklist. But the user can still submit request. I don't know how to fix it.
1
Hiedi Kysther
Hi carol jiao,
To assist you better, I've created a ticket on your behalf so we can troubleshoot this together. Please check your email. Thank you!
0
Steven Aranaga
Does the blocklist apply to tickets submitted through the modern chat widget? I have spam coming in from chat and I have added the domain, but the tickets seem to keep opening. Now, here it talks about adding reject: or suspend: in front of each domain, but the in-app guide simply says to list the domains. I just added the reject: and will see if that works.
If it doesn't, then I really need the widget to only appear to logged in users on my HC, which doesn't seem to be an option?
0
Hostmost Engineering (S) Pte Ltd
Hi, there are so many companies are using machine auto reply for some important work like Microsoft will generate auto reply for a reset password. Zendesk should give us an allow list for accepting auto generated mail. We also has some work with Station that they will auto generate a login password for engineer to further access the system, but all these are being suspended by Zendesk and only admin can release or recover it. This is very inconvenience since engineer could work 24/7 while Admin only during office hour. Pls consider to import this issue. My request is too allow receive of auto mail by a domain allow list.
1
Anh Nguyen
is there a way that we can block domain for Support Form submission?
1
Mike DR
You can create a custom code for your widget to show up for signed in users using one of these codes (depending if you're using the Zendesk Messaging Widget or the Zendesk Classic Widget):
To hide your widget:
[Messaging] Core messaging Web Widget API (#hide)
[Classic] Core API (#hide)
To show your widget once your customers are logged in:
[Messaging] Core messaging Web Widget API (#show)
[Classic] Core messaging Web Widget API (#show)
You can also use these authentication method to verify if your customers are logged in:
[Messaging] Authentication
[Classic] Authentication
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