Testing your email setup

Five tests that prove your email channel works end to end, before you tell any customer about it.

Five tests that prove your email channel works end to end, before you tell any customer about it.

Use an outside address

Test from an address on a different mail provider, not from a colleague's account on your own domain. Internal mail takes a different path and hides exactly the problems that matter.

The five tests

1. Incoming. Send to your support address. A ticket appears, with the right requester and the right brand.
2. Outgoing. Reply from Zendesk. It arrives, in the inbox rather than in spam, from your address.
3. Threading. Reply again from the outside address. It lands on the same ticket rather than creating a second.
4. Attachments. Send one in each direction and open it at the other end.
5. The automatic reply. Whatever your trigger sends on receipt, read it as a customer. This is the message most people never look at.

Look at the message, not just the ticket

Test two and five are about what arrives in the inbox. Open it there: check the sender name, the subject, whether any placeholder came out empty, and whether the mail provider shows a warning.

Then test the awkward cases

• A message with no name, to see how your greeting behaves.
• An out-of-office reply to one of your messages, which should be suspended rather than becoming a ticket.
• A reply to a closed ticket, which should produce a follow-up ticket.

Retest after changes

Email breaks silently. After any change to DNS, domains, brands or triggers, run tests one to three again. Two minutes, and it catches things a customer would otherwise find first.

See also

• Why my email does not reach the customer
• Why one email creates two tickets
• Why there is a blank line where my placeholder should be