| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| February 8, 2023 | July 10, 2023 | July 17, 2023 |
On July 10, 2023, Zendesk is introducing a 365-day limit for the amount of time it retains stored copies of the email comment files associated with the View original email feature in Support. This feature is rarely used after the first two weeks, and customers will be able to download the email copies during the 365-day period to keep them. This update will have no impact on email comments within the ticket history or conversation view.
This announcement includes the following topics:
What's changing, and why?
Currently, there's no limit for the amount of time the View original email feature in Support displays stored email files, even though those files are rarely accessed by customers after the first two weeks. If your account is forwarding email through your own domain, the email source files remain available within that domain or service for as long as the retention period is.
Starting July 10, 2023, a 365-day limit will be applied to the stored email files for the View original email feature, and any stored files older than 365 days will be removed automatically after that same date.
This change allows us to streamline our data practices and to better align our product experience with customer usage.
How will this affect me?
Starting July 10, 2023, the new 365-day retention limit for stored email files associated with the View original email feature will be applied to all new inbound email comments. On that same date, any existing stored email file copies associated with the feature that are older than 365 days will be removed as well.
What do I need to do?
No action is required. As of July 10, 2023, the View original email feature will only be available on comments for 365 days, and any stored file copies older than that will be removed on that date as well.
To preserve the source files of some of these comments beyond the 365 days, they can be downloaded on a case-by-case basis using these instructions.
As always, we’re here if you have questions or need support. Here’s how to contact us.
19 Comments
Could this be updated to count from the time a ticket is archived instead of the date the email is received? So that one can fully audit a tickets' emails until a specific period after archived.
Considering rare tickets related to long unresolved topics, in which it'll be useful to have all records available until they're done with.
Zendesk has changed the rollout date for this update to July 10, 2023. It was previously scheduled for June 26, 2023.
Hi Zendesk,
This is a disaster for our company to lose this functionality, we need to keep the original data for auditing purposes.
It happens sometimes that when an end user replies inline you can't see the reply in the ticket you can only see the reply by going to the "view original email".
Also when an end user changes their email address you can see in the original email the correct email address, yes I do know that you can find email changes in audit logs, but agents do not have access to the audit logs and the person that deals with Zendesk in our company will not be very happy to get requests daily to check if possible an email address of an end user is changed.
Because of the removal of a very important feature, we somehow now need to retrieve the data, can you please inform me if there is an API that we can use?
Also is it possible to delay the date for our account?
I seriously do not understand that you take something away, that will mislead many many tickets!
This update removes (after 1 year) access to original messages received from customers.
Yes, such access is rarely needed percentage-wise, but it is definitely needed. Zendesk always hides parts of customers' responses. For example, signatures under emails are almost always hidden in Zendesk main interface and can only be seen using "View original email". While seems not important, we do need to see them every now and then as people put their contact information in their signatures. Yes, we need to see them after 1 year too.
Also, we do need to be able to open old tickets and understand what we did in them and why. Again, not quite often percentage-wise, but very regularly our customers are replying below "##- Please type your reply above this line -##". In this case their reply is visible only in the "View original email". We have whole tickets where normal Zendesk interface shows only empty replies from customers and we are replying to them after reading their messages in "View original email". History of messages, information received from customers and history of events are important to us. We need to be able to open old tickets and see why certain decisions were made. We are using tickets for serious communication and not simple sales.
Yes, we can download original emails and keep them on our side. But then we will have to build our own ticketing system to link those archived emails to each ticket where they are taken from.
Have you taken into consideration that some lines of business have various statutes on requirements for how long they have to keep/retain ANY correspondence with their clients? For example, federal involvement means a mimimum of 7 year retention. If you want to try and limit how long they are kept wouldn't it make more sense to add a setting so that each of your clients can set it to the # of days that they are required to maintain records for the line of business and clientele that they are involved with?
Hi all, I appreciate the comments and feedback! This change is being made to allow us to make Support a more scalable and sustainable product as Zendesk continues to grow. View Original Email is used extremely infrequently on comments older than one year so we are bringing the feature in-line with its usage.
The email correspondence information and its contents will still be stored within Tickets themselves and within the audit logs. Additionally, for customers that utilize Email Forwarding, these emails will additionally be stored within their Email Client itself, giving another avenue to access that information if necessary.
Mike, I’d recommend looking into removing the Delimiter, which should eliminate instances in which customers are replying below that text, and will improve the agent and end-user experience. If it is a common occurrence that there are empty replies in a Ticket when there should be information shown, I’d recommend opening a ticket with Zendesk so that we can look into how to fix that potential issue.
Dear Benjamin,
Thank you for your reply, but I would also like to kindly request that my questions be addressed more directly.
Based on your reply, it appears that Zendesk's decision-making process prioritizes the frequency of "view original email" usage, rather than considering the genuine needs of your valued customers who are paying a lot of money for the services of Zendesk.
This approach raises concerns, as it implies that important information that may be required in the future could be removed without sufficient consideration.
Given the decision at hand, it is crucial that Zendesk provides customers with a means to retrieve the data that is about to be deleted from their Zendesk instances. Simply suggesting that "customers that utilize Email Forwarding will have these emails stored within their Email Client itself" overlooks the fact that not all customers have this setup, as we had assumed that the email data would be retained within Zendesk.
Consequently, I now find myself in the position of needing to retrieve data from all tickets since 2017 and store it elsewhere. I firmly believe that it is Zendesk's responsibility to provide an API that allows us to access this data. Considering that Zendesk already has an API, as evidenced by the functionality available within the platform, I respectfully request that you make it publicly accessible.
Moreover, I would like to address the timing of this announcement. By sharing this information in February and only allowing customers 4-5 months to find a workaround, it puts a significant burden on your customers who are already preoccupied with their pressing business needs and ongoing projects.
In light of the substantial effort required on our part, I kindly request that you consider delaying the rollout. I believe you can understand the magnitude of the work we are faced with and the impact it will have on our operations.
Hi Fallon, I appreciate the background here and why View Original Email is important to your company. As a next step, can you please open a ticket with us in Support to continue the discussion into your company’s business case around this? That will allow use to have a focused conversation about the impact on your company and help there be a smooth transition.
Benjamin,
Removing the delimiter is a horrible idea.
Some customers are removing delimiter themselves, as a result each message in the ticket shows also all previous messages, as they are quoted in each reply. This makes it super difficult to navigate inside such tickets. Imagine that you have a ticket where customer already replied 15 times and their reply number 15 is shown as 7 pages long because it contains all previous replies (quoted). This, together with absence of "Go to next message inside the ticket" button in Zendesk and recently removed hairline that separates messages, makes it difficult to navigate in such tickets. Luckily, this happens rarely, but this is a very bad user experience and it's definitely will not help to introduce this behaviour to all tickets.
Another need to use "View original email" option is that when examining old tickets we need to know who was writing to us. This is only visible in the original email. In the interface we see not the name that is listed in the "From:" field of email, but name associated with this email in Zendesk Customer database. We saw many cases when they were not matching.
I understand that Zendesk does not want us to open tickets with Support with regards to this change and that we are requested to post here instead.
Hi Benjamin,
I have already an ongoing ticket regarding this, they told me to address my concerns and questions in the announcement.
This change seems to have completely broken Zendesk for us; we cannot view original messages from any time.
Hi Benjamin, this change has not been rolled out yet. If you are experiencing an issue with View Original Email, please open a ticket with our Support team for us to investigate.
Hi Zendesk,
this change is a disaster for our company too.
Seems like we aren't the only ones with that opinion.
We also have the problem that sometimes the content of the mail correspondence with the customer is not shown in the ticket completely if it was forwarded to Zendesk.
If you can't guarantee that it's working 100% of the time, it's absolutely irresponsible to rollout that feature.
Maybe you should prioritise your existing customers over the growth of Zendesk and aquiring new customers.
Hi Zendesk Team,
I can only agree with Sarah Julean on this.
It is absolutely necessary to ensure that the correct and/or complete content of the customer's email is always displayed in the ticket before the rollout takes place. If, for example, a complaint has to be checked in our company, but we can't trace the order process properly, this leads to major problems.
In addition, there are legal retention periods of 6 - 10 years in Germany that we have to adhere to. Therefore, it is extremely important for us to first ensure the correct display in the ticket.
We need a way to archive these. Please update the ticket API to include the original email ID that points to the message on our own MS Exchange server.
We are happy to store a copy of the original email on our own servers longer than 12 months. But we need your help to add a pointer to it. Then we can use our own API to download and view the original email hosted on our own MS Exchange server
Hi Dave,
The API Ticket Audits endpoint will provide the Message-ID for the inbound email update. This is the universal record locator for the email that updated the ticket and should be able to be used to find the associated email on your forwarding servers.
Please let us know if you have any more questions.
Hi all, reaching out to let everyone know that we have re-evaluated this new limit based on customer feedback and will be rolling back the introduction of the 365 day limit on the amount of time Zendesk retains stored copies of email files associated with the View Original Email feature in Support. The rolling back of this limit will begin this week on 8/23, and should be complete by the end of week.
Thank you to everyone who reached out to provide your concerns and feedback.
Hi Benjamin,
To be sure, will this feature not launch? And I can stop with all the work I already did to retrieve old original emails and I do not need to implement a solution for future emails?
Cheers.
Hi Fallon, yep, that is correct. For customers that had reached out with exception requests, this product limit will not roll out. For customers that did not reach out with an exception request, the limit will be rolled back with no impact to the email file copies that are utilized by View Original Email.
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