Just like a typical email inbox, Zendesk provides its users with a separate view to access suspected junk or unwanted emails. In Zendesk, these are referred to as Suspended tickets and, unsurprisingly, they can be found in the “Suspended tickets” view at the bottom of your other views.

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A suspended ticket is not a fully-formed ticket in that it doesn’t have a Ticked ID and can’t be edited as a ticket without first being “recovered” into a normal ticket.

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Beyond filtering out junk, Zendesk also suspends tickets that it suspects are automated responses such as auto-replies and out-of-office emails. It does this as Zendesk wants to ensure your agents are only tasked with handling tickets from real customers needing their assistance.

Whilst these automations are handy, what if you find emails in your Suspended tickets view that shouldn’t be? Or perhaps you’re receiving unwanted tickets in your agent views and want to send them straight to Suspended tickets instead.

In this article, I’ll show you how to recover suspended tickets, control what Zendesk does and doesn’t automatically suspend, as well as share a few handy hints and common mistakes to look out for.

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Recovering suspended tickets

When you first start receiving emails into Zendesk, it’s worth checking your Suspended tickets view every couple of days, to ensure that nothing important is being missed in there. Once you are comfortable that Zendesk is filtering these tickets well, checking once per week is sufficient to ensure nothing is overlooked.

Moving a ticket from Suspended state to a normal ticket is easy. Just click on the black button titled “Recover Automatically”. In one click, this will remove the email from your Suspended tickets view and turn it into a normal ticket. If you are dealing with thousands of Open tickets at any one time, it can be worth copying some text from the body of the email before you recover it. You can then paste this copy into the Zendesk search to easily find the ticket.

Occasionally, Zendesk will tell you that a ticket could not be recovered automatically. In this case, click on the arrow next to “Recover Automatically” and recover the ticket manually.

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All this does is add an extra stage of opening the ticket up in the ticket editor as if it had not yet been submitted by the requester. Clicking submit will create the ticket as if it had never been suspended.

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Send unwanted emails to the Suspended view

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Reporting Spam

If you find that unwanted tickets are not being suspended when they should be, there are two approaches you can take.

If the tickets are spam and are coming from varied email addresses, your agents can report the tickets as spam by clicking the three dots in the top right of the ticket editor.

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Doing this repeatedly will gradually teach Zendesk which tickets your team does not want to see. This will send them straight to Suspended instead.

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“Blocklisting” senders and domains

Another alternative is to block email addresses or whole email domains. This will ensure that any emails received from the email addresses you provide will go straight into Suspended tickets.

Suspending domains is similar. Let’s imagine you are receiving hundreds of unnecessary automated emails every day from your courier company. Rather than having agents solve or delete them, and rather than asking the courier company to turn them off, you can simply block their whole email updates domain. For example, if they sent emails from parcelupdate@courierupdates.com, shippinginfo@courierupdates.com and parceldelivered@courierupdates.com, you can blocklist courierupdates.com and every email that is sent from an address ending “@courierupdates.com” will be suspended.

If blocklisting a whole domain, just ensure you don’t need to read any other emails sent from that domain. If that is the case, it’s best to blocklist the unwanted email addresses one by one.

To blocklist a domain, head to Admin Centre > People > (Configuration) End Users) and then scroll down until you see “Blocklist”.

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Allowlist–stopping emails from being suspended

The opposite of the Blocklist is, unsurprisingly, the Allowlist. If you find genuine tickets that your agents need to respond to are being suspended, this is the one for you. It works in the exact opposite way to the Blocklist.

Any email address or domain added to the Allowlist will not have its tickets suspended from Zendesk.

The Allowlist can be found immediately above the Blocklist on the same page.

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Contact forms–a common problem

Many clients of mine find important would-be tickets from customers in their Suspended tickets views. It’s quite rare for Zendesk to block emails sent from personal email addresses. Instead, the culprit is usually a third-party contact form. Let me explain why and how to fix this.

Whilst Zendesk does effectively have its own contact form that you can integrate around the web, most websites and apps use third-party providers for their contact forms outside of their Help Centre.

These forms are often set up with the same email address used as both the sender and recipient. Let’s imagine your support address is help@company.com. When a business creates a contact form, it needs to tell that form where to send the email notification that the contact form outputs. This choice is obvious - they want it to go to their support address, help@company.com as this is set up to receive emails in Zendesk.

The less obvious part is that the contact form will require whoever is setting up the form to enter an email address that the form should say the email to Zendesk is coming from. Without other obvious choices, many choose to use the same email address, help@company.com. Thus the email is sent from help@company.com and to help@company.com.

Given that this is effectively like sending an email to oneself, Zendesk has a problem with it! The reason is valid; Zendesk recognises that if it didn’t suspend the ticket, your standard auto-response would be sent to the requester email. And given that the requester email address is the same as your support address, this would come straight back into Zendesk. Zendesk would then send an auto-response to this email and you’d be stuck in an infinite loop!

Zendesk’s automated solution to this is to suspend tickets where the address it was sent from is the same as your support address. Despite this being the smart choice, you can actually manually recover these tickets as a temporary solution. It’s very likely that you’ll find that when you open up the fully-fledged ticket, the requester will have changed from your support email address to that of the customer who actually filled out the form. This is because emails don’t only have two contact fields, from and to. There is a third; reply-to. Without a value in reply-to, Zendesk or any email tool will send any reply to the from email address. If the reply-to field is populated, however, any reply will actually be sent to that email address. So a reply-to email address always overrides the from email address when replying.

The sustainable solution, of course, is not to manually recover each suspended contact form submission but to stop them from being suspended to start with. To do this, modify your contact form so that it does not use any email address that is registered as a support address in Zendesk.