Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Email in Zendesk has two halves that are configured separately: mail coming in, and mail going out under your name.
Incoming
Every account has an address at your Zendesk subdomain that works immediately: support@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com. Mail sent there becomes a ticket.
What you almost certainly want is your own address instead, and that works by forwarding: mail arrives at your address, your mail system forwards it to Zendesk, and Zendesk makes the ticket.
Outgoing
Replies are sent by Zendesk but should appear to come from your domain. Receiving mail servers check whether that is legitimate, using DNS records you publish: SPF says Zendesk may send for you, DKIM signs the messages.
Without them your replies are treated as suspicious and a proportion land in spam. Nobody reports that, because from the customer's side you did not answer.
How replies stay on one ticket
Zendesk identifies the ticket three ways: the References and In-Reply-To headers, an encoded ID in square brackets in the body, and an encoded ID in the receiving address. So a customer replying to your email lands on the existing ticket, which is also why replying to an old thread about something new produces a ticket with the wrong subject.
There is a limit on that: threading data is kept for 30 days. A reply to a conversation older than that starts a new ticket however correctly it was addressed, and that is not a fault.
What gets held back
Not everything becomes a ticket. Zendesk suspends mail for around 25 named reasons, spam and automated replies and out-of-office messages and failed authentication among them, and puts it in the Suspended tickets view instead.
Somebody has to look at that list, because unrecovered suspended tickets are deleted automatically after 14 days. A genuine customer message that lands there and is never read is lost.
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