| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| May 24, 2023 | May 23, 2023 | May 26, 2023 |
We are excited to announce a change to the article notification emails sent to section followers each time a new article is published.
This announcement contains the following topics:
What’s changing, and why?
Article notification emails are sent to users who are following a section each time a new article is published. Notification emails contain the entire article content, regardless of the access permissions set on the article. In other words, if a customer has access to the article when it's published, they’ll receive a notification with the full content.
Recently our customers began to report broken images in their notification emails while viewing them in Gmail. This problem is due to the fact that Google uses a proxy in front of all links in emails as a security measure, and they recently changed the external content that was allowed. This change meant that our image URLs were no longer allowed to display content.
How will this affect me?
As a quick response to Google’s change, we implemented the ability to directly embed images in the emails and limited them to the first five images in the article.
To address the security vulnerability of not respecting article permissions when sending out the emails, we introduced a rule where the content of the articles is not sent out in an email for the restricted articles. Instead, customers receive a notification and link to the new article in the section. For all public articles, the content is still sent out.
What do I need to do?
You don’t need to take any action. However, if you’re interested in learning more about following sections, see Help center guide for end users.
14 Comments
Katarzyna Karpinska
Will there be controls to toggle this on or off? I can see this being applicable to some content for security purposes, but some content is only restricted to signed in users where public content may not be applicable to someone that doesn't have a login.
Also, I'm concerned that emails from Guide may be far less useful in these contexts if a large bulk of a subscribed section is restricted. Will we start seeing emails that are only a link back into the content?
Hi Dan Cooper,
We had to act fast in reply to Google's change and because the only workaround was to start sending out image files in mails (and not links that expire after a while) we decided to lean towards being more conservative regarding security.
You have a good point, however, I'll see if we can do anything to make this more customizable.
This change has created a critical issue for us. We have been relying heavily on the ability to send article content via email to customers for several years. We use this for our product release notes and service notifications, which we do not want to make publicly visible. We have hundreds of users subscribed to these sections specifically to receive these emails and it would take a lot of effort to move these subscriptions to a different platform.
There is very important product information that we need to distribute to our customers, and requiring them to click a link to view it is not acceptable because nine times out of ten they will not do that. We need a setting to toggle this on and off ASAP.
Same here @chandra - if this doesn’t have a fix immediately, we’re churning.
Hi Chandra Mullineaux and Randy Shore, I created a ticket for you where we'll follow up on your specific cases.
Katarzyna Karpinska, we also have a use case(s) that would make having a toggle or some method to reinstate text in the email vs. the new link more optimal. Please create a ticket on our behalf for further discussion. TY!
Katarzyna Karpinska This is also a critical issue for us. Like multiple people have mentioned, we need a way to re-instate the previous method (even if visibility to an article is restricted, those with access still receive an email with the content of the article). This use case is fundamental to why we chose Zendesk.
We have also been using the section subscription for various important notifications including release notes and service maintenances. This is yet another breaking change that seemed to have been announced after rollout. How can we revert this change?
Katarzyna Karpinska We now have reports from customers that actually want to have the article contents back in the messages. For an example, many software companies (like Zendesk itself) use it to share product announcements and other important updates, not only publicly with customers but often also with partners or a select subset of customers. It would be good if this setting would be part of the User Segment itself, so each User Segment has its own rule how to work with such notifications.
Would it be possible to rollback this change for select accounts, meanwhile Zendesk works on a fix for this?
Hi Katarzyna Karpinska
I see in the comments of the article that several others have the same issue as we do.
We need a setting to toggle this new rule on and off because we use this as a communications channel for thousands of people globally.
Hello Katarzyna Karpinska
We do have the same Issue here. We use this section subscription for informing our customers about maintenances ,updates and important informations . Its important for us, to see the content of the article in the subscription mail.
Please open up a ticket for us too.
Katarzyna Karpinska, same here. Please make this configurable or roll back for our account temporarily.
Hi All, quick update, we are planning to introduce a setting for these notifications later this week.
Hi All,
I'm happy to share that you are now able to control this setting by yourself in guide settings. More about it in this announcement.
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