I see. That’s default behavior from Zammad and, as far as I’m aware, not going to change in the future.
However, the following pull request for extension of our documentation gives hints on how to change the way Zammad handles public notes.
Please note:
This documentation part currently is undergoing QA and thus might have wrong or misleading texts.
Also, this does affect your SLA calculation, if the note if public. This change is update safe.
Yes and no.
At this very moment you can’t tell Zammad to always have a default article type to answer. Personally I don’t think it’s too good of an idea, because especially in E-Mail-Context this will lead to issues (e.g. do we prefill the to field and if yes with what mail address (as it might be possible that we communicate with more than one person in a ticket)).
I suggest using the “Reply”-Button below the article you’re answering on, that will create an mail article automatically and should do the trick.
Now for ticket creation, you actually can enforce a default article type for the ticket creation. This enforces e.g. a outgoing mail on the first article (only). See: Advanced customization settings — Zammad System Documentation documentation