Emails

Freshdesk presents a simple solution of bringing the emails in your mailbox into Freshdesk as tickets so that agents in your portal could work on them from within the tickets tab itself.

In order to achieve this, please navigate to Admin >Channels > Email and enter your support email address by clicking on "New Support Email". Kindly note that a "Forwarded To" address would be generated, using which you would have to set up a Forwarding Rule from within the Settings Tab of your support mailbox. For detailed instructions on setting up the forwarding, please refer to this article and the video tutorial in it.

Furthermore, each support email address can be assigned to a group as per your preferences and workflow.

You have started with Freshdesk and would like to add an email address to the portal so that when customers write to this address, all the emails would be converted into tickets. 

In order to process this, please navigate to Admin > Channels > Email > New Support Email and add this email address here. Once this is done, a "Forwarded To" address is generated which has to be set up in your mailbox. Kindly, navigate to this document which would help you convert all emails to tickets.

Here's what we recommend:

• First, check to see if the verification email is in your Spam folder.
• If you can't find it in your spam folder, then try resending the verification email. Navigate to Admin > Channels > Email and click on the 'Verify' button.

Sometimes, it is possible that there's a delay in the delivery of verification emails. So, please wait for some time before you try again. If you still haven't received the verification email after following the above steps, get in touch with our support team by sending an email to support@freshdesk.com. We're always happy to help. 

After a support email address is added to your account, it would have to be activated to start receiving tickets. To activate an email address, you would have to click on the "Send Activation Link" option, corresponding to it. This would send an email to your support email address, containing an activation link. You would have to click on this link to activate your support email address.

At times, while clicking on the link, you would receive an error saying "Activation Code Invalid". This error comes up either -

• when the support email address is deleted after the activation email was triggered. 
• when the activation email expires because a new one was triggered.

In such cases, please make sure that the latest activation link is being used. If the issue continues, kindly write to support@freshdesk.com and one of our agents would get in contact with you to assist further with this instance.

You can follow these steps to verify your support email address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ_nORFqlJM&list=PLsYJ3BsyR4qGFujlW0iDtOBOf4IPVsAqt&index=10

There could be multiple email addresses that your customers write to, for contacting you. You can set up multiple support email addresses from the Blossom plan onwards.

You could add only one support email address in the free Sprout plan to your Freshdesk account. In such cases, you can only edit the default email address and have a custom support email address added under Admin > Channels > Email. 

Alternatively, you can upgrade to a higher plan after which you would be able to associate multiple email addresses with your Account.

The emails from Freshdesk are sent through Sendgrid, which is our email service provider. If you are willing to use your own mail servers instead of Sendgrid to send and receive emails, you could use the custom mail servers feature of Freshdesk. 

You could set this up by adding the IMAP and SMTP details of your mail server, to your Freshdesk Account, under Admin > Channels > Email > Edit(corresponding to your email address)-->Use your own mail server.

This feature is available from the Blossom plan of Freshdesk.

You could choose an email address from your domain to send emails out of Freshdesk. You could add this new support email by navigating to Admin > Channels > Email > New Support Email.

Furthermore, if you wish to remove the Via Freshdesk.com tag in your emails, you could either add a DKIM record in your domain or use a Custom Mail-Server along with your Freshdesk Account.

Note: The Custom Email-Server feature is available only from the Blossam plan of Freshdesk.

To customize your email notification content, Go to Admin > Workflows > Email notifications and then choose the respective notification ,click on Edit and then save it.

In cases where you have emails in your Inbox, that you would like to convert to tickets in your Freshdesk, you could forward those emails to your support email address. As such, this would create a ticket with you as the requester of the ticket. However, you could create a ticket with the original sender as the requester, when an email is forwarded from your mailbox to the support email address.

To set this up, please navigate to the Admin > Channels > Email > Advanced Settings and Turn ON the option "For forwarded emails, use original sender as requester". After this option is turned on, tickets created through forwarded emails would use the original sender of the email as the requester of the ticket instead of the agent who is forwarding the email.

If the emails or replies to tickets from Freshdesk are being directed to the Spam folders of the customer's mailbox, you can enable the feature called DKIM to avoid such instances. Please refer to the link to know more about DKIM. 

If the reply is from the requester of the ticket or anyone part of the ticket conversation thread(in cc to the ticket conversation), Freshdesk will check for the Message ID and append the reply to the original ticket accordingly.

If the replies are coming in from a person new to the thread or an entirely new email, the system will look to append the reply based on the Ticket ID in the subject line, which would have to be of the format [#{{ticket.id}}](for ex., [#12345], where the ticket id is 12345). This concept is used for replies to emails sent by Automations or Email Notifications. 

There are a few steps that need to be checked for this issue:

1. Go to Tickets tab > click on the view name at the top of the page > select the Spam folder > check if the ticket is present here. If so, restore the ticket > click on the Activities at the top right corner and check if there are any automation (Ticket Creation, Time Triggers, etc) that have worked on the ticket. If not, click on the contact's name displayed to the right of the ticket > check if the contact is deleted. Restore the contact and all future emails from the contact will come through as tickets. 
2. If the issue is for all emails coming to your support email address, check if the forwarding rule has been set up as shown in the link. Only if the forwarding rule has been set, would emails from the mailbox get forwarded into Freshdesk as tickets. You can check if the forwarding address is working by sending an email directly to the forwarding address displayed under Admin > Channels > Email. 
3. If the 'From' and 'To' addresses of the email are the same, it will not get created as a ticket in Freshdesk. The same applies if the 'Reply-to' and 'To' addresses are the same. 
4. If you are in the Estate or Forest plan, please check if you have enabled Helpdesk Restriction (only emails from specific domains can be created as tickets). Move to Admin > Account > Helpdesk Settings and scroll down to check the same. If you have chosen 'Users from whitelisted domains', change it to 'Users from any domain' and save the changes. 

Whenever an agent replies to the thread of an already existing ticket from their mailbox, it will be added as a public note on the ticket. 

If the agent sends an email to the support email address as a new thread, it will create a new ticket with the agent as the requestor. 

To append a new email to an existing ticket, include the Ticket ID at the beginning of the Subject line of the ticket in the format, [#{{ticket.id}}].

For example, the agent would have to insert [#1234] to the subject of a new email to append that email into Ticket number 1234.

If the replies to a ticket from the customer is not getting appended to the original ticket , or if the replies creates a new ticket, then kindly refer this link for detailed information on the checks to be done.

There might be instances where a ticket conversation would have to be forwarded to a third party, that is not a part of your helpdesk. For example, if you would like to forward the ticket to your Inventory Partner or to the Dev Team, you can have it done by the following methods:

1. Click on the Forward button in a ticket.

2. Enter the third party address in the To field.

3. If you are on the Blossom plan or above, you can add the public ticket URL in the message of that ticket. 

Note: You will not be able to find the 'forward' option for Private notes added to the ticket.

If there is more than one ticket created for the same email, then these are few checks to be done :

1. If the email has been received in your mailbox multiple times, then an equivalent number of tickets will be raised in Freshdesk.
2. If there are multiple support email addresses in the same email, then it would be forwarded individually and get created as separate tickets in Freshdesk.
3. If none of the above is applicable, then please fetch us the email headers of the email that got duplicated as tickets and drop an email to support@freshdesk.com. Refer this link to know more about email headers.

Freshdesk has the option to include the Agent's name in the sender information of emails sent out of your Freshdesk Account. However, if you would like your Helpdesk's name or company name to be used instead, you would have to make a change to the email configuration.

Navigate to Admin > Channels > Email > Advanced Settings and toggle off 'Use agent names in ticket replies and outbound emails'. This would ensure that the emails are sent with the name of your support email address, which would be available at the "Name" field under Admin > Channels > Email > Edit (corresponding to the support email address).

The default behavior in Freshdesk is that the reply to a ticket would be sent using the support email address from which that ticket was created. 

However, if your requirement is to reply through an email address irrespective of the email address from which the ticket was created, you could install an app called "Customize 'From' Email Address". This can be installed under Admin > Support Operations > Apps > Get More Apps.

DKIM generates a signature, which is attached to the message while in transit, to verify the authenticity of the message source. This signature is associated with the organisation’s registered domain name. On reaching the destination, if the message has its signature validated, then the source of the mail is verified. Hence no one can send emails impersonating your organisation and support emails sent by Freshdesk on your behalf will not get marked as spam.

By default, the Ticket URL would be added automatically to any reply you send out of Freshdesk. The requesters could use this URL to access the ticket on your portal. 

However, if you wish to remove this URL from your replies, kindly navigate to Admin > Workflows > Email Notification > Templates >Agent Reply Template and remove the {{ticket.url}} from the "Content" section.

The default behaviour in Freshdesk is that, when an agent replies from their mailbox, it will be appended as a public note on the respective ticket. 

However, when an agent replies to an email notification of a private note, that reply will be added as a private note.

The agent's email address could be configured as one the support email addresses of your Freshdesk Account. Hence, the tickets are going to the agent's email address. It is highly recommended that the support email address and the agent's email address should be different to avoid mail looping issues.

You could make use of the Automations in Freshdesk, such as Ticket Creation, Time Triggers, and Ticket Updates to send escalation emails to multiple agents. Using automation, you could send an email to an Agent or a Group if a certain condition is met. 

An example would be to set up a supervisor rule(under Admin > Workflows > Automations > Time Triggers > New Rule) with 

Condition: "Hours since first response due/overdue greater than" (depending on your use-case) 

Action: "Send Email to Agent" add the name of the agent to whom you would like to escalate.

The default font for the portal 

An admin can set up a default font for the agent portal from Admin > Account > Helpdesk Settings. This is the font that your agents will use while composing messages/replies to your customers. We have included more font family and font size options. You will also be able to see a preview of how the font would look like. 

Agent’s font preferences

If you want your agents to change the font format, then you can enable the ‘Font preference for agents’ option under Admin>hepdesk. 

The agents can choose to change the font family or font size from the reply editor under the ticket details page while replying to the tickets. 

When the agents click on the icon 'A', they will be able to view and choose the formatting options as shown below :

Rich text formatting in Freshdesk Support Desk mobile app:

When typing a response, agents can tap the ‘A’ text icon in the message field to open the formatting toolbar. They can choose to select an option from the toolbar, preview what the message exactly looks like before sending it.

With this, you can bold your text, italicize it, link it to a webpage, add lists, and so on. 

You can have the content on the reply editor changed from Admin > Workflows > Email notifications > Template > Agent Reply Template. To add the agent's signature the agent needs to click on the Profile image > Profile settings > Edit profile.

An error message saying "An internal error occurred. Please contact support." would be displayed when you are trying to edit the email notifications by signing up with an email address from a generic domain such as gmail.com or outlook.com. In such cases, you would be able to edit the email notifications only if there are more than 10 tickets created in your account.

If you continue to face further issues, please drop in an email to support@freshdesk.com with your Freshdesk URL and we'll have this sorted for you. 

The reason for this breakage is because, the HTML content of the emoticon would break the UI of the Ticket Details page, because of which the content after the emoticon would not appear within the ticket.

In such cases, kindly write to us at support@freshdesk.com. We would be glad to assist you in fixing the ticket breakage on your account.

You can disable forwarding set up in your mailbox that connects to Freshdesk so that every email does not get converted into a ticket. Instead, you can manually forward the tickets to your support address.

Emails are the primary source of communication with your customers. When the emails do not get delivered, it is a hindrance to your regular pace of work which we would definitely not want you to face. A few basic checks before reaching us would be: 

• Please check if you see an email delivery failure inside the ticket - this might be caused by a couple of factors such an unauthorised recipient address, invalid domain or server error - the message would give you details about this as well.
• Sometimes, the client email address might be in the drop address for which you could contact us to clear this right away. 

If this needs more assistance, kindly write to us (support@freshdesk.com) so that we could troubleshoot this further. 

Only after the forwarding rule is set up in your support mailbox, would emails come into your Freshdesk Account as Tickets. So, please make sure that the forwarding is configured from the mailbox of your support email address to the Forwarding Email Address, available under Admin > Channels >Email, in the "Forwarded To" section corresponding to your email address.

This forwarding rule is for internal operation only and the Forwarded To address would not be displayed to the customer at any point.

There could be cases when one of your support email addresses would be in cc of a conversation. As a result, the email thread would be converted to a ticket and the conversation would get recorded within your Freshdesk Account.

There isn't any default option to prevent tickets from being created in such cases, as the mailbox keeps forwarding all the emails from your primary inbox to Freshdesk as tickets. But, you can set up a Ticket Creation rule under Admin > Workflows > Automation > Ticket Creation >New Rule, to automatically delete the ticket if the email address in Ticket CC is a support email address.

The default behaviour in Freshdesk is that when the From and To addresses of an email are both the support email address, a ticket would not be created. This is to avoid any sort of looping because of tickets and email notifications.

Please try sending the email from another email address to create the ticket.

You have a presentation or meeting with your team to discuss metrics, and so, you have triggered relevant reports for the same. Unfortunately, this did not come through to your email address. Please check the following when you find a delay in this email delivery: 

• Sometimes, there might be an issue with server connectivity - kindly try generating the report after some time. 
• Please check if any of the other agents in your portal is able to fetch this report for you. 
• Kindly check if this is found in your spam or trash folder of your mailbox. 

If these are not working out for you, please contact us (support@freshdesk.com) where we could check if the email address is in our bounce list or the mail has been queued at your end. 

To ensure the proper delivery of email, you would have to enable DKIM for the email domain of your support email address. You could have this done from within Freshdesk, using the DKIM Settings option under Admin > Channels > Email > Advanced Settings -> Configure DKIM.

You would be given CNAME entries that would have to be added to your DNS. Once these entries are published, you could raise a request to Verify these entries. Once they are verified from the backend, DKIM would be enabled with those domains for Freshdesk.

Why do I see this?

We have upgraded our email service with better security. Please ensure that you have reconfigured your DNS with the latest records.  

If you see this message banner on your helpdesk, we would have updated the CNAME entries which you need to configure on your DNS. We have done this because we have upgraded our email service to ensure enhanced email deliverability and security. 

For seamless delivery of emails, please verify if you have correctly updated the records. You can do so by following these steps:

• Go to Admin > Channels > Email > Advanced Settings > Configure DKIM (or reach this page directly by clicking on Reconfigure DKIM on the banner) 
• Click on Configure in the corresponding domain. This will generate a new set of CNAME records*. 
• Simply copy these records and paste them into your DNS without removing the older records. After you have added the new records, click on Verify against the corresponding domain and complete verification. You can remove the older DNS entries once the new records have been verified on Freshdesk.

Please ensure that you complete these steps before 31st May 2020. Otherwise, email deliverability would be impacted, and your outgoing emails wouldn’t be DKIM signed.

Note: Don’t worry, clicking on this wouldn’t impact your existing email delivery since we still preserve the older records.

When you are in the Blossom plan (or above), you have the ability to create more than one support email address and map them to the portal for your customers to write to them. These would come in as tickets as expected considering that the forwarding is set up right for these addresses. 

When the customer writes an email to the newly configured address, the response from the agent goes from this new address as expected. But when an email is raised on the portal, which is by clicking on "submit a new ticket" - the reply by default goes from the global support email address. Please make sure, this is checked when you are replying to a ticket and intend to send from a different email address. This can be changed by choosing the required address from the drop-down next to the "from" address. 

Group/Shared inboxes at times cause issues with ticket creation and appending of replies. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you do not use them as your support email addresses.

For further information on this, you could always write to support@freshdesk.com.

If your domain service provider is GoDaddy then the TXT record has to be added differently for the validation to pass.

For example: Let's say the CNAME is help.sauls.com. Generally, based on this solution article, mapping would be:

fdkey.help.sauls.com to <generated-verification-code-in-Freshdesk>

However, for GoDaddy, you will only need to enter 'fdkey.subdomain' as GoDaddy automatically adds domain.com to the record.

Based on our example CNAME, if you were to add fdkey.help.sauls.com, GoDaddy will again add the domain to the record resulting in this format: fdkey.help.sauls.com.sauls.com causing the validation to fail.

If your domain service provider is 'GoDaddy', create a TXT record mapping just fdkey.subdomain to <key-generated-in-Freshdesk>.

For every incoming email, Freshdesk checks 3 email markers to understand whether the email is a reply to an already-existing ticket. If the email is identified as a reply, Freshdesk performs additional sender email checks to make sure it's not spam.

Email Markers Check

Freshdesk looks for the following three markers in every incoming email. For an email to be threaded to a ticket, it has to pass one of the following checks:

1. Ticket ID (if enabled) 
2. Message-ID 
3. Unique Identifier
   
   

For detailed information on ticket threading in Freshdesk, please refer to the article here

If you receive a  'Domain verified in other account' error message, remove the records you have added for the account, exit the page, and then re-add the values by clicking on ‘Domain’. 

If the issue persists, write to support@freshdesk.com with a screenshot of the error displayed. 

For more details on DKIM, refer to this article.

If you get a '404' error while configuring DKIM, then write to support@freshdesk.com with a screenshot of the error, we will have this checked from the backend. 

For more details on DKIM, refer to this article.

If the DKIM records are unique and valid but not verified yet, then contact your DNS host or drop an email to support@freshdesk.com keeping your DNS host in the loop.

For more details on DKIM, refer to this article.

You can send up to 30 outbound emails per day if you are on the Free plan.

If you are on Growth, Pro, or Enterprise plans, there are no limits to the number of outbound emails you can send. 

If your account is on a trial state under any plan, then you can send up to 5 outbound emails per day.

If you are using any Google Workspace or Google Cloud Identity, there will be no immediate impact for you. However, we request you to reauthorize the mailbox and use OAuth as it is the standard secure way.

To help keep your account secure, starting May 30, 2022, Google will no longer support the use of third-party apps or devices which ask you to sign in to your Google Account using only your username and password. Read more

If you are using basic authentication, the incoming and outgoing email transactions will not work due to the deprecation post-May 30th, 2022.

This will hamper ticket creation, agent replies, and all email notifications sent via configured mailbox.

How to reauthorize your Gmail address in Freshdesk?

The email server settings under Freshdesk will require a re-authorization. If you are using Gmail as a default or custom mail server in Freshdesk and if you have already configured basic authentication, follow these steps,

1. Go to Admin > Channels > Email and you will see the list of email addresses present in your account. 
2. There will be a warning displayed under the email address which has been authorized using basic authentication. Click on the link to reauthorize the mailbox via Oauth as shown below:
   
   

3. Once you click on ‘Click here, you will be redirected to the page as shown below. Click on ‘Sign in with Google’ and you have successfully reauthorized your account. 

4. If you have multiple Gmail based support emails then you have to individually do the OAuth/reauthorize for each support email

Enabling 2-factor authentication:

If you are not able to reauthorize your Gmail account and move to OAuth 2.0 before May 30, 2022, alternatively you can enable 2-factor authentication (2FA or 2-step verification) and configure application-specific passwords.

Here are the steps to enable 2-factor authentication: 

Note: This is not an official confirmation with Google that this is indeed a viable alternative. However, it is recommended to move to OAuth 2.0 before May 30, 2022.

1. Sign in to your Gmail account.
2. Click Settings on the top right corner.
3. Click Accounts and Import tab on the Settings page.
4. Click Other Google Account settings in the Change account settings: option.
5. Click Security on the left panel.
6. Scroll down the page to the Signing into Google section (screenshot below).
7. Select the 2-Step Verification option and follow the in-app instructions.

For any further assistance drop an email to support@freshdesk.com