Cloudmark - Spam Detection Option

+1 agreed - we run into this all the time. We have to use the Shredder app to set up rules to autorecover as we have thousands of suspended tickets. It would be best if we can turn off the automatic spam filtering - we already have an external system that scans them anyways. If they pass that, then they are cleared to go into ZD.

Like OP, we are more than happy to opt out of the CloudMark system, but we cant.

This is not just a problem for suspended tickets. Individual replies will be suspended, depending on if the spam filter see a particular comment sourced from an  IP that is on a SPAM list.

Example:

A ticket was opened yesterday and there is a few back and forth between the agent and customer gathering data on the issue. Then the ticket stops receiving updates from the customer. This has many legitimate reasons, sometimes the users find the problem and move on.

In this case the customer did reply. She used a legitimate email service (gmail.com), but the IP gmail.com used to send the email with the reply onto Zendesk was on a SPAM list (sometimes even the big guys get their IPs flagged). 

Result: That reply never made it to the ticket. Rather it was suspended. We did not followup, since we had the last comment on the ticket waiting for them to respond.

We have found other times when there is multiple CCs on a ticket, but only replies from a specific email in CC are suspended. Again, its because their email service provider happened to use a dirty IP. We cannot control what IPs GMAIL chooses to use, nor can our customers.

Brought this up with Zendesk support, specifying that having the filter apply to new tickets could make sense, at least a false positive does not generate an auto reply so the customer knows something went wrong. But silently dropping individual comments on EXISTING tickets because the sending IP happens to be in an SBL is a fundamental flaw. 

A spammer would need to match lots of attributes on an existing ticket to sneak into the conversation. Yet, the answer from support was: 

…. currently, there is no issue to fix as the system is working as expected. Unhealthy sources email will likely be suspended in all opportunities, that's why IPs and domains are listed. 

Translation: until the internet cleans up all IP space, expect random comments to disappear. Make sure you review your suspension box every 15 minutes or before every reply.

Handing off the process of filtering your core product which is communication, to a third party and not having a way to let your customer base opt out / affect the process when the solution fails is bonkers. The customer base is vast and diverse. How did this implementation make it through review?

@moran12 If you want to use your company's spam filters then you could adopt either the Gmail Connector or the Exchange Connector, as both of them do not run additional spam scanning. We will very likely always require spam scanning for traffic that arrives openly through an smtp connection. We may consider raising the spam threshold for the Authenticated SMTP Connector, as this is creating a secured/trusted relay between your email servers and ours. 

Hi Sean, 

Given the SPAM volume on the net it makes perfect sense that you will always apply a filter. However, Zendesk has a lot of context that can be applied to tickets from existing users or, our primary pain point, new comments on existing tickets

Applying an old school filter at the SMTP edge generates far too many false positives. You could pass SPAM matches through a secondary check that validates if there is a ticket with a matching message-ID. This way we avoid all the false positives on open tickets, while not opening any new doors for spammers, as they would need to guess the ID string.