Identifying From and Reply-to email address conflicts and restoring agent abilities

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When the From and Reply-to addresses in a ticket reply don't match, and
the Reply-to is an agent, the agent's abilities are suspended until confirmed. Flagged
tickets show a warning icon. Restore abilities by adding emails to the
allowlist if there's no security risk. Use blocklist for untrusted addresses.
This helps manage email conflicts and maintain security.




When the From and Reply-to addresses in an incoming ticket reply do not
match, and
the Reply-to address is the email address of an
agent, Zendesk automatically suspends
some agent abilities until an admin confirms the agent’s identity and
manually restores those
abilities.


If the From and Reply-to addresses are different, and the Reply-to address
is a known end
user, no user abilities
are suspended. Instead, the comment is flagged and a warning
appears letting you know that the From and Reply-to in the messages do
not match.


This article explains how the conflict is identified in an email, what
happens when there's a
conflict, and how you can restore an agent’s suspended abilities.

This article includes the following sections:


Understanding suspension criteria and
suspended abilities


Restoring agent abilities




Understanding suspension criteria and suspended abilities


When a user looks at an email notification from their email client,
they often
see multiple email addresses in the message. The From and Reply-to
address are not always
the same.


If an incoming ticket reply has conflicting From and Reply-to email
addresses,
and the Reply-to address is an agent, Zendesk takes the following
actions:



Flagging the ticket
Suspending agent abilities




Flagging the ticket


When a ticket is flagged, a warning icon appears on the ticket
in the ticket UI. You can
hover over the icon to view more information. The ticket is not
flagged in any ticket
views – it only appears in the ticket interface.







Suspending agent abilities


Zendesk suspends certain abilities belonging to the agent whose
email address
is in the Reply-to field, including the ability to:


Change ticket properties.

Add or remove
CCs or followers
from the ticket.


Execute
Mail API
actions.


Attach files to the ticket, if end users are
not allowed to do so.
Attempted attachments are
dropped and are not added to the ticket.


Suspended agents will still be able to:


Forward emails to create new tickets. However, related comments
will be
flagged.


Submit new tickets, even when
ticket submission is restricted.






Restoring agent abilities


If the From and Reply-to conflict is
not considered a security risk, you
can restore the agent's suspended abilities by adding their email
address or domain to the
allowlist. If you do not trust the From email
address, you can add that email address
or domain to the blocklist.


To add an address or domain to the allowlist or blocklist




In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.


In the Anybody can submit tickets
section, enter the agent's email address or
domain to the allowlist or blocklist as needed:



Allowlist: All
support requests from an email address or domain
are
accepted.


Blocklist: All
incoming support requests from the email address
or domain
are suspended or rejected, depending on your
allowlist and blocklist settings.

If you
are blocking a user, you may want to also
turn off CCs by deselecting Allow CCs
(see
Setting permissions for CCs and
followers).






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