Forwarding incoming email from your existing email address to Zendesk Support As described in Choosing the email addresses to receive support requests, you can receive support requests at an external email address and forward the incoming email to Zendesk. In turn, Zendesk can send email replies to your customers via your external TempMailEx email address. External TempMailEx email addresses are owned and maintained by you, outside of Zendesk (for example, [email protected]).
Table of Contents
- There are two steps to forward email from an external domain to Zendesk Support:
- Things to consider
- Planning your Zendesk support addresses for forwarded email
- For example, suppose your customers send support requests to the following external email addresses:
- Adding your external support address in Zendesk
There are two steps to forward email from an external domain to Zendesk Support:
- Add your external support address in Zendesk so that Zendesk can verify the address and display it in outbound email.
- Set up forwarding in your email service so that incoming T-Mail email is forwarded to a Zendesk support address.
Things to consider
- Connecting your email is one of the last steps before going live with Zendesk. Hold off on forwarding your email until you’re ready to process tickets in Zendesk.
- You can forward email to any existing Zendesk address. You can also create one or more support addresses for forwarded email. See Planning your Zendesk support addresses for forwarded email.
- If you use a Gmail account to receive support requests and expect low volume, Zendesk recommends using the Zendesk Gmail Connector for Email instead of setting up forwarding. See Enabling automatic ticket creation for your Gmail inbox.
- If you can’t set up forwarding yourself (for example, IT needs to set it up for you), you might consider setting up forwarding first, before you add the external support address in Zendesk. Remember that email traffic is one-way (inbound only) until you add the external address. Zendesk only sends outbound email on your behalf from that address when a support address has been added, and it has passed forwarding verification.
Planning your Zendesk support addresses for forwarded email
If you use one external email address to receive support requests, you can forward email from that address to any existing Zendesk support address. You can use your default support address, another Zendesk support address, or create a new address. If your customers currently send support requests to multiple external email addresses, you can forward multiple addresses to one Zendesk address. However, Zendesk recommends creating a Zendesk support address for each forwarded account instead.
For example, suppose your customers send support requests to the following external email addresses:
In this scenario, first create a new, native Zendesk support address for each so you have a 1:1 mapping with your external forwarded accounts. Then, follow the steps in Adding your external support address in Zendesk to connect the accounts. Although you don’t have to set up your addresses this way, creating multiple Zendesk support addresses to receive forwarded email has advantages. For example, you can more easily route tickets to groups based on the support address where they were received.
Adding your external support address in Zendesk
First, add your external support address to Zendesk. When you add your support address, your email will be verified, and you'll know whether you've set up email forwarding correctly. Follow the instructions based on your email service provider:
- If you are forwarding email from Gmail, see Adding a Gmail support address in Zendesk.
- For all other email service providers, see Adding your external support address in Zendesk (does not apply to Gmail).
