Turning off ticket management in your help center to allow email-only support

Some Zendesk customers prefer not requiring their end users to sign in. Removing the sign-in requirement means end users can't view or track their requests on your help center, and they can't follow or vote on help center articles. These tasks require users to sign in. Instead, all communication between agents and end users occurs using other channels.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support

Team, Professional, or Enterprise







Summary: ◀▼
You can disable ticket management in your help center to support customers primarily via email, allowing ticket submission without sign-in. This removes sign-in links and ticket page links from notifications, limiting users to anonymous access for searching help articles but not tracking requests or participating in the community. Adjust settings and email triggers to remove sign-in and ticket links, and customize your help center theme to hide sign-in options.






Note: This article offers various methods to prevent users from signing
in to your help center, allowing you to primarily handle support requests through email.
While these suggestions remove sign-in opportunities for end users, Zendesk cannot assure
these methods will completely prevent end users from creating an account.

Some Zendesk customers prefer not requiring their end users to sign in. Removing the sign-in
requirement means end users can't view or track their requests on your help center, and they
can't follow or vote on help center articles. These tasks require users to sign in. Instead,
all communication between agents and end users occurs using other channels.
To provide support primarily through email, you need to understand the impact of this change
on your customers, and then work through the items described in this article.
This article includes the following topics:


Understanding how email-only support
impacts customers
Allowing anyone to submit
tickets
Removing links to ticket pages in your
email notifications
Removing sign-in links from your help
center




Understanding how email-only support impacts your users

When turning off ticket management in your help center, end users can still request support
without signing in by using any of the following channels:
Sending email directly to your support email address (for example,
support@mycompany.zendesk.com)
Submitting a support request using the Web Widget (Classic)
Chatting with an agent
Leaving a voicemail
Sending a request through social media


Regardless of the channel by which new requests are submitted, requests become tickets that
agents manage using views, creating and applying macros, generating reports, and so on. All
communication between agents and end users is captured on those tickets, and emails are sent
back and forth between both parties.
End users can still access your help center to search for answers. You can promote this
self-service support option by providing your end users with the link to your knowledge base
(for example, https://mycompany.zendesk.com/hc).



Allowing anyone to submit tickets

To allow requests without requiring end users to sign in to Zendesk Support, you need to
modify your end-user settings. Only administrators can make these changes.
For information on making these modifications, see Enabling anyone to submit tickets.
When an unregistered end user submits a request for the first time, they are added to your
Zendesk Support as a new end user. They receive the request confirmation email but not the
verification request email. They remain unverified in Zendesk Support.

Note: You can leave the Allow users to view and edit their profile data and Allow
users to change their password options turned on since your email-only end users will
never be able to sign in to do either of these things. Both are still relevant to your
administrators and agents.



Removing links to ticket pages from your email notifications

Users must sign in to view ticket pages in your help center. Because you don't want to
require end users to sign in, you need to remove any links to ticket pages from any email
notifications sent to end users. Some of your default triggers create notifications with
ticket links.


Removing ticket links from your notifications

Remove any links to ticket pages from the default triggers that send email notifications
to requesters. Here are the triggers you need to modify:
Notify requester and CCs of received request
Notify requester and CCs of comment update


You'll also need to modify any similar notification triggers (if any) that you created.
Only administrators can edit the triggers.
You might also need to modify triggers that send email notifications to requesters and
CCs, as well as the follower email template. See Customizing default email notifications for CCs and
followers

To remove ticket links from email notification triggers
In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules >
Triggers.
Click the Notify requester and CCs of received request trigger to open it for
editing.
Update or remove the #{{ticket.id}} and
{{ticket.url}}
placeholders from the text in the email body.
Remove {{ticket.url}}, as this placeholder renders as a full
URL path to the ticket.
Remove #{{ticket.id}}, as this placeholder renders as a link to
the ticket. Alternatively, remove # from the placeholder (so it
reads {{ticket.id}}) to render the ticket ID as plain text.


Click Save.
Repeat for the Notify requester and CCs of comment update trigger.






Removing sign-in links from your help center

In your help center, removing elements that link to the sign-in page involves deleting or
hiding template components. You must be a Knowledge admin to edit template components.


Note: Customizing your help center theme is not available on the Suite Team plan.

Your agents, like your end users, will no longer see a sign-in link for your help center.
To access the sign-in page, your agents need to use the following URL:
mycompany.zendesk.com/access. This is the sign-in page.
Removing the ability to sign in means that every visitor to your help center is treated as
an anonymous user with limited privileges. Anonymous users can view the public areas of your
help center and share links to content. They can't comment on articles or participate in the
community. Because anonymous users can't participate in the community, consider disabling your help center community, if you have one.
To remove the links to the sign-in page

In Knowledge admin, click Customize design
( ) in the sidebar.
Hover your mouse over the theme you want to edit, then click View theme.
Click Edit code to open the code editor.

From the list of templates, click header.hbs.
From the code, comment out the sign_in fragment, like
this:
{{!--
{{#link "sign_in" class="sign-in"}}
{{t 'sign_in'}}
{{/link}}
--}} If
you are using an old theme, you might see a user_info in place of a
sign_in fragment. Comment this out
instead:

This component
displays a sign-in button on the right side of the header.

Select the article_page.hbs template and delete or comment out the following
classes:

The
vote component and the article-comments section prompt users to sign in.

Click Publish.



{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408888722842-Turning-off-ticket-management-in-your-help-center-to-allow-email-only-support",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408888722842-Turning-off-ticket-management-in-your-help-center-to-allow-email-only-support",
"headline": "Turning off ticket management in your help center to allow email-only support",
"description": "You can disable ticket management and sign-in options in your help center to support users primarily through email, adjusting settings and templates to remove sign-in and ticket page links while maintaining ticket handling via other channels.",
"articleSection": "Setting up your email channel",
"datePublished": "2021-10-16T17:09:08+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-05-18T16:23:38.851539+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408888722842-Turning-off-ticket-management-in-your-help-center-to-allow-email-only-support"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"url": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk"