Finding Unverified Emails

9 Comments

  • Max McCal
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi, Renee – 

    Thanks for this. Very detailed. I'm interested to know if you can tell me what you use the verification status for? It seems like you may be looking at this piece of information a lot more frequently than many of our other users, and I'm interested to know why. We're thinking a lot about how verification works, and your particular focus may be very useful.

     

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  • Reneé Lasswell

    Hi, Max,

    Yes, we have our account security set up so that you must have a Zendesk account to create a ticket and we require that initial tickets always be created via ticket forms so that we get the most information we can on the initial ticket creation, reducing back and forths.

    This means that our end-users fill out the ticket form, and when Zendesk sees that no account exists for the email they used, it starts to create their account and sends them an email to verify the email address. Which we want for security reasons. It then drops it in the suspended ticket queue until that email is verified.

    We find that emails that are not verified are usually due to typos so the player will never receive our emails and/or if they didn't get the verification email usually the spam or server settings for spam are too high and they didn't get our email to verify their email and again won't receive any subsequent replies from us. 

    Not working these unverified email tickets greatly reduces work from our agents that will never be received.

    Hope this clarifies. Happy to provide more details if needed.

    1
  • Max McCal
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Thanks, Reneé! Very helpful. If you're requiring verification, how are your agents coming across tickets from unverified users? Are they using suspended ticket recovery to create fully fledged tickets, or are they somehow getting through another way?

    Would you say you're primarily concerned with ensuring agents don't spend time answering questions from unverified users, or with making sure valid users verify their email addresses?

     

    0
  • Reneé Lasswell

    I am concerned for both reasons and so far, I think I have found two ways the unverified emails creep into the system. However, there may be more that I have not uncovered.

    1. Mistakes when checking and managing the suspended queue tickets. 2. When an end-user adds or changes emails on their Zendesk account and subsequently doesn't verify it/them.

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  • Max McCal
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Thanks, Reneé, noted. This is great. We're thinking about lots of things related to this, and while there aren't any projects ongoing at the moment, we're always grateful for this feedback so that we can take it into account as we continue development.

    0
  • Matt Ek

    Having a report that would tell us who is in an unverified status allows us to reach out to them and encourage them to "verify" or determine that they are no longer in need of being an end user and remove the.     It seems this would be a standard report, provide a listing of those end users that are in an "unverified" status and then a report for those users that are "verified" .   How soon could this be made available? 

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  • Dave Dyson
    Thanks for your feedback, Matt! We get thousands of feature requests each month and there are a lot of factors that go into our product development decisions, so we're not able to respond to or deliver on all the requests we receive. But we appreciate your input and our product team spends time in these forums every week, and our product team will respond here if there are any changes to the status of this request. To learn more about our product feedback process, check out this short YouTube video and/or check out our Product Blog for more insights into some of the development work from our team. 
    0
  • Lou
    Community Moderator
    The Product Manager Whisperer - 2022

    I have found a bug related to this. If I have a requester with several email addresses (very common in our B2B setup), and one of them is unverified, and it is not the primary email, it's deliverable_state in the database is set as mandatory. For some reason, all public replies are then sent to this non-primary email address. Once I "verify" the email address, everything corrects itself.

    This seems to be a recent bug, so I assume it's related to some ZD update behind-the-scenes that we're not aware of as end users.

    This is a HUGE problem as we deal with agent companies and set up their main distribution as the contact. Rather than creating a bunch of requesters, we just put all of the individual agents that work for them as secondary email addresses within the requester. This way, any inbound email from any of them is treated as from the primary, while all outgoing emails go to the distribution email.

    If there were a way to find all unverified email addresses, I could clean this up and avoid the problems outlined above.

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  • Salim Cheurfi
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Louis, 
     
    It's Salim from the Zendesk Technical Team, I will do my best to help.
     
     
    The best way to find all unverified users would be to use an API call:
     
    /api/v2/search.json?query=is_verified:true
     
    or,
     
    api/v2/search.json?query=is_verified:false
     
    Regarding the issue of unverified emails that overcome the primary email, I will open a private ticket between us and investigate this.
     
    Best, 
    1

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