Email reply to previously created ticket creating more tickets. How to stop it?

[Andy Duong]

In Service Desk Cloud, I've created a ticket and included external customers, they replied to the email and a new tickets was generated.  Zendesk has a feature where if a follow-up reply came in, it would not create an additional ticket but add on to the existing ticket.   We have had to link 7 tickets to the parent one because Jira created multiple tickets when certain people responded which is very difficult to track and figure out what is going on.  Can this be avoided in Service desk?

[Sherrie Wollenhaupt]

In SalesForce you could copy the support ticket reference number from the subject line of emails from a support ticket, and add it to any email you were forwarding, replying to, or sending and it would add the email to the ticket.

In Zendesk, you can add an email to an existing ticket by forwarding it to your Zendesk support address with the ticket number included in the email subject line. However, there's an important nuance: Zendesk primarily uses email subject lines for ticket creation, not automatic updates to existing tickets.

That said, community testing has shown that you can successfully add emails to existing tickets by including the ticket number with square brackets in the subject line. For example, if you're working with ticket #123, you would include [123] in the email subject.

How to Make It Work

To successfully forward an email into an existing Zendesk ticket:

1. Include the ticket number in the email subject line using square brackets (e.g., [123])

2. Use the encoded ticket ID format: [{{ticket.encoded_id}}]

3. Send the email to your Zendesk support address

One user in the Zendesk community successfully tested this method and was able to send emails into existing tickets using the encoded ID format.

[Seiler Instrument]

We have had this issue as well. A person that is copied on the initial email sent to the service desk clicks reply-to-all to that initial email and thus creates another ticket. Is there a way around this other than telling everyone that they can't reply to an email that they are copied on?

[Gregory Van Den Ham]

How were those people replying?   Were they replying to the original email that had the service desk copied on it or replying back to an email that originated from the service desk instance?

I believe without the Issue key being in the email, Jira Service Desk doesn't know how to link the email to the Issue.

Make sure the users are replying back to the email that comes from the service desk or has come from the service desk previously and contains the Issue key.