Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Retiring a support address takes longer than switching it off, because customers keep writing to it for months.
The phased way
- Publish the new address everywhere: website, signatures, printed material, automated messages from other systems.
- Keep the old one working and add a trigger that tags tickets arriving at it, so you can see the volume.
- Watch the volume fall. Months rather than weeks, particularly if the address appeared on anything printed.
- Add an automatic note to those tickets mentioning the new address, once the volume is low.
- Remove it when the volume is negligible.
The trigger has a trap in it
An advisory note on tickets arriving at the old address is the right move, and it collides with everything else you already have. Your normal notification triggers fire on the same update, so the customer gets your advisory and your standard acknowledgement, about the same ticket, seconds apart.
The fix is the same shape as always: have the advisory trigger add a tag, and add that tag as an exclusion on the notification triggers that would otherwise double up. Worth doing before you switch the advisory on rather than after somebody complains.
Keeping the address alive without configuring it
Once the old address is gone from your support addresses, its forwarding rule still points at your Zendesk subdomain. Accepting wildcard addresses is what lets that mail keep arriving, and it is the cheap way to stay reachable through a long tail without maintaining a support address you have retired.
Do not simply delete it
Mail to a removed address bounces, and the customer sees a delivery failure from a company they were trying to reach. Some will try again; many will not, and you never hear about them.
Watch the tag
Step two is what makes the rest possible. Without a number, deciding when to switch off is guesswork, and somebody will do it too early.
Automated senders are the long tail
Other systems configured years ago keep sending to the old address, and nobody remembers which. The tag shows you who they are, and each one needs a person to update it.
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