Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
The Gmail connector pulls mail from a Google account instead of relying on forwarding. Simpler to set up, with trade-offs.
Connect it
- Open Admin Center, then Channels, then Talk and email, then Email.
- Choose to connect a Google account.
- Sign in with the Google account holding the support mailbox and grant access.
- Confirm which address it applies to.
- Send a test message.
Connecting is not instant and it is not silent. Zendesk imports the unread mail that arrived in the last hour, up to 300 messages, and that can take a quarter of an hour. After that it checks the inbox every minute. So an inbox with a backlog of unread mail produces a burst of tickets the moment you connect, and it is worth reading the inbox before you do rather than after.
Why you might prefer it
- No forwarding rule to configure or to be broken by a Google policy change.
- No confirmation dance with a code that lands in your ticket queue.
- Fewer rewriting problems, because the message is not being forwarded.
What to weigh
- It depends on one Google account. If that account is suspended, renamed or loses access, mail stops. Use an account that belongs to the organisation rather than to a person.
- Authorisation can be withdrawn by a Google administrator without anyone telling you, and the symptom is simply that tickets stop arriving.
- Outgoing mail still needs SPF and DKIM. The connector handles incoming only.
- Google's own sending limits apply. Five hundred messages a day on Gmail, two thousand on Google Workspace. Approach it and you get a warning, and notifications quietly move to Zendesk's own mail servers instead. Nothing breaks, but the sending infrastructure changed under you, which matters if your SPF was written for one of them and not the other.
- An alias, a distribution list, a shared mailbox or a Google Group is not a supported support address. They cause routing and header problems, whatever route you take into Zendesk.
Whichever route you take, check it periodically. Both forwarding and the connector fail silently: no error, no bounce, just no tickets. A weekly glance at your inbound volume catches it within days rather than weeks.
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