Forwarding incoming email to Zendesk Support – Blink Digital

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As described in Choosing the email addresses to receive support requests, you can receive support requests at an external email address (instead of a Zendesk Support email address). To do so, you need to forward email that’s coming into your external email account (Gmail, for example) into Zendesk Support.

In addition to setting up email forwarding to use your external email address, you'll need to add your support address in Support and, optionally, add an SPF record.

This article contains the following sections:

Configuring email forwarding

You configure email forwarding in your own email account, not in Zendesk Support. Exactly how this is done depends on the email provider you're using. A number of email providers allow you to create email forwarding rules so that you can select the incoming mail that should be forwarded to your Zendesk account.

Zendesk Support does not support multi-forwarding, or forwarding that goes through multiple locations before being sent to the Zendesk support address. In the event that multi-forwarding is configured, the requester will be the first address that Zendesk can find in the Reply:To or From: fields in the email headers. This could produce inconsistent results and is not supported.

Important: Be sure to set up automatic forwarding rather than manually forwarding. Manually forwarding an email that originates from an external support address will result in a suspended ticket.

Follow the steps for your email provider to set up forwarding.

Disclaimer: Zendesk can't provide support for third-party products, such as email clients. Reach out to your email provider if you need help setting up automatic forwarding.

Tip:If you are trying to import tickets from a previous customer service software system using the same inbox, you will need to use the Zendesk API (see Ticket bulk import).

Additional steps for using an external email address

After you set up forwarding in your email account, there are a couple of additional steps to complete the setup for using your external email address.

Create a new external email-based support address in Zendesk Support (see Adding an external support address).
When you add your support address, your email will be verified, and you'll know whether you've set up email forwarding properly.
Edit or create an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to verify that Zendesk can send outgoing email on behalf of your email server (see Allowing Zendesk to send email on behalf of your email domain). This step is optional but recommended.
You can also digitally sign the outbound email from Zendesk (see Digitally signing your email with DKIM).

Reference: Zendesk Support - Forwarding incoming email to Zendesk Support