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
Mihai
Hi there,
I find these two options AllowList, suspend/reject, account creation, ticket creation a bit confusing.
Is it possible to:
- disable new user registration for a domain (do not impact/touch any other domains -> this means I cannot put a * in the blocklist)
- create let's say manually 5 accounts for that domain
- those users can see each others' tickets, create new tickets, etc ?
- no other users from no other domains are affected
So far I get the feeling that it's one or another.
"The keywords reject: and suspend: 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."
0
QB Interface
For examples I highly recommend the following Zendesk Support Thread by Kristie Sweeney.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6136740916250-Understanding-the-allowlist-and-blocklist.
0
Paolo
Unfortunately, your use case is a limitation for now. This would be a good feature request though.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
0
Jeremy
Any chance we can add a common subject to the allowlist? We sent out an email to a distro and want to see all of the replies but about half get filtered as spam. Or is this stricly domains and email addresses?
1
Adrian Narvaez
Same question as Jeremy above. Can we allow a certain subject string to the allow list?
1
Arianne Batiles
Hi Jeremy and Adrian Narvaez,
I'm afraid we can only whitelist a domain or email address and not the email subject. However, the most important thing is to address why emails are getting suspended. If email responses are being marked as spam, we need to dig deeper and determine what causes these emails to be considered spam.
Sharing with you the ff. articles that you may find helpful:
0
Amos Chen
I'm trying to add an entire domain to my blocklist. the domain is @qq.com and we get maybe 300 spam emails from them daily. In the blocklist i added "qq.com" however the spam emails are continuing to come in. Am I missing something?
0
Christine Diego
Could you please add the keyword "reject" followed by the domain name (e.g. reject:qq.com) to completely block support requests from the specified domain in the blocklist. If the issue still persist, please reach out to Zendesk Customer Support.
0
Lucas Case
I'm wondering if it is a problem to allow a head domain and block a subdomain. This has to do with a certain subdomain that is being used for messages from users (hashed), We would like to block these messages (an integration is already in place for this). So for example:
Allowlist: main.com
Blocklist: reject:sub.main.com
0
Krizzia Kaey
We’ve been getting a lot of spam tickets lately. Unfortunately, we can’t block them because they keep coming from new email addresses. How can we stop these spam tickets from reaching us?
0
Peg Hines
How can we block characters (Asian)? We blocked the domain, but they are still getting through
0
Aaron LEE Kwang Siong
Can I confirm for the allowlist that the top level domain is sufficient or all subdomains must be specified also?
0
Rox Wong
It appears that the blocklist (reject:qq.com) no longer blocks emails from qq.com. Several such emails have been received in the past few days, such as ken22@vip.qq.com.
0