Question
I can see duplicated tickets with the same subject, but not nested in the same ticket. Why am I getting duplicated tickets?
Answer
Duplication of tickets occurs when your mail provider doesn't correctly process the email headers of the forwarded emails to Zendesk.
The screenshot below shows an example of what the email headers between the two duplicated tickets look like.
The In-Reply-to:
and References:
strings help Zendesk understand if the message is part of an existing ticket or not. If that information is scrapped or wrongly set up, the ticketing interface won't be able to nest the replies accurately.
To access the email headers
- Click the options menu icon (
) for each of the first replies in the duplicated tickets, then select View original email.
- The original email is displayed. Click the Source tab to see the details of the email headers.
To prevent duplicated tickets, ask your IT team to investigate how the email headers are processed when forwarded in Zendesk. Have them ensure that both In-Reply-to:
and References:
strings are set up.
For other related issues, see this article: Why do emails thread to the wrong ticket?
3 comments
CJ Johnson
"You'll need to check with your IT team to investigate how the email headers are processed when forwarded in Zendesk in order to ensure the messages are correctly nested to avoiding to create duplicates."
This is somewhat misleading advice, because any email sent to @yourdomain.zendesk.com, like any reply to a ticket email, does not pass through "your" email processor, it only passes through Zendesk's. "Your IT" would tell you to reach out to Zendesk, because your email servers never touched or forwarded it. For me, the problem 100% of the time for this has been on Zendesk's side, not mine.
In fact, this is actually a super common situation, as Zendesk's email processor is unable to thread any messages sent from an iphone, for example. Support has said that it's because "iPhone email replies cannot thread because they are plain-text.".
This issue results in a duplicate ticket every time an iphone user replies via email via their phone. It *only* happens when tickets hit Zendesk's email processor, not internal ones, as Gmail, Outlook, etc have no such issue threading these messages.
0
Khanh Dinh
The explanation is very confusing, I have a lot of this issue as well
"On one side, you'll see the In-Reply-to: and References: which help Support to understand if the message is part of an existing ticket or not. "
=> So when will a mail reply/message be considered as a part of an existing ticket?
Must a reply have both In-Reply-to: and References: to be considered as a part of an existing ticket?
I have 2 tickets with exact the same Subject, Requester (from Agent), In-Reply-to: and References: 's content, and they are duplicated each time the agent replies via email (not via Zendesk)
Maybe it is expected, maybe not but I still don't understand the mechanism and the explanation here
-1
Dane
Additional information can be found on Why do emails thread to the wrong ticket?
As a rule of thumb, all
In-Reply-To
andReferences
lines should contain unique values. If one of these lines uses a static message-ID or email address, Zendesk will thread incoming emails into the same ticket.0