Forwarding incoming emails to Zendesk Support

As described in Choosing email addresses to use for receiving support requests, you can receive support requests to an external email address (instead of a Zendesk Support email address) . To do this, you need to forward all emails that are received to your external email account (Gmail, for example) to Zendesk Support.

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

This article covers the following sections:
Email forwarding setup
Additional steps for using an external email address
Email forwarding setup

Email forwarding is set up in your own email account, not in Zendesk Support. The exact details of the process will vary depending on the email provider used. Several email providers allow you to create email forwarding rules so that you can select which incoming emails should be forwarded to your Zendesk account.

Zendesk Support does not support multiple forwarding, or forwarding that occurs through multiple locations before sending to the Zendesk support address. If multi-forwarding is configured, the requestor will be the first address Zendesk can find in the Reply: or To: fields in email headers. This can produce unexpected results and is not supported.

Important: configure automatic forwarding instead of manual forwarding. Manually forwarding an email from an external support address will result in a suspended ticket.

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

Google Gmail and G Suite
Yahoo Mail
fastmail

If you need help setting up automatic forwarding, contact your email provider for assistance.

Tip: If you want to import tickets from your old customer service software system using the same inbox, you need to use the Zendesk API (see Bulk importing tickets).
Additional steps for using an external email address

Once you've set up forwarding on your email account, there are only a few steps left to complete the setup for using your external email address.

Create a support address based on the external email in Zendesk Support (see Including an external support address).

By adding your support address, your email will be confirmed and you will know if you have configured email forwarding properly.

Edit or create an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to confirm that Zendesk can send email on behalf of your email server (see Configuring SPF for Zendesk to send email on behalf of your domain of e-mail). This step is optional, but recommended.

You can also digitally sign email sent from Zendesk (see Digitally Sign Your Email with DKIM or DMARC).