We’re currently facing some issues with the set-up of automatic replies if a customer sends a mail to a certain mailbox.
First of all, we are providing a contact form via our website. By providing this, we would like to encourage our customers as much as possible to fill out this form on our website. This gives us the opportunity to classify the questions (e.g. related to a certain domain, topic, case number, etc.).
By setting up the right triggers, these questions can automatically be assigned to the right team within our organization.
Nevertheless, we are aware that it is unavoidable that some customers may address the mailbox behind this contact form (servicedesk@…) directly. We would like to avoid this because it’s our goal that all customers us this contact form to ask questions.
What we would like is that these type of questions (so a customer directly sending an e-mail to servicedesk@…) are (1) ignored (so if possible, no ticket is created) and (2) the customer receives an automatic reply in which he/she is informed that his/her ticket is not created and that he/she has to log their question via the contact form on the website.
Any suggestions/ideas how we can tackle this problem properly?
You’re requesting two contrary things here.
If Zammad is supposed to ignore mails, it cannot reply to them.
In fact replying is also possible with Triggers for which you’ll need a ticket.
Either ensure on mail server level that sending to a specific account is possible or allow sending to the mailbox.
Another issue I see here:
What happens if your customer is supposed to reply to a existing ticket?
That’s not how this is gonna work I’m afraid.
Sole independent points that may help on your journey but are not directly linked to above request:
You could tag specific mails to be deleted by an scheduler after a specific time to “remove” tickets.
You could also reply automatically to those.
Zammad can differ in between ticket creation and updates in various scenarious.
Your contact form may want to use API instead of email.
This will allow you REAL categorization up front in a better way.
It also removes complexity of the desired “don’t allow direct email tickets from end users” situation.
Documentation for the API can be found here: https://docs.zammad.org/en/latest/api/intro.html