Gmail connector — add failure notification

yah i got disconnected too recently... shld be a bug... alr reported. 

agreed there shld be a notif!

hope can resolve soon. missed quite some client's emails...

This is very important to have at least the "disconnected" notification (either email or popup in app). We have changed our gmail account's password and we were not aware that this would disconnect our integration, as it uses API, not our password, to authenticate. It was disconnected for a couple months!

The weird thing is that emails send as always from Zendesk using our integrated gmail account, and that is why we didn't notice any problems for such a long time. There was only an issue with forwarding emails from gmail to Zendesk so we missed hundreds of reply emails from our clients from the last couple months. We are very very disappointed, Zendesk should notify us that there is a problem right away! Now we have to deal with angry customers and apologize for delayed replies.

Zendesk Team, please add that notification asap, this is a must!

+1 for this!

+1 for the feature

+1, stopped getting new tickets today...

Of further interest, since it was Zendesk themselves that de-authorized our Gmail connection (per https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037602614) and I was digging through my email to try to find any notification this was going to happen (I couldn't), I did find that this type of notification exists (or existed) for Twitter:

Hi, our gmail connector was disconnected for a period of time as well. However, emails received to our support team were not importing into Zendesk. I have about 130 emails in my customer care inbox that need to go into Zendesk. Is there a way that I can do this?

Thanks,

Bill

The 'solution' I've been given in the past is to set up Gmail to forward emails to your Zendesk support address (or create a new Zendesk support address for this purpose--you can create unlimited support addresses for free). This basically moves the import function from the somewhat unreliable Gmail connector over to the (I guess?) more reliable Gmail forwarding function. YMMV ...

We're also having this issue! In our case, the email was disconnected for just over a month and caused us to miss 500 emails from our members. As a small startup, that's 1/4 of the emails we receive each month and has an incredibly massive impact.

What I'd like to see is a notification sent out any time an email is disconnected so that we can quickly rectify the issue and respond to any client emails. 

After speaking with a very kind rep, the only options that I'm left with is manually verifying that our email accounts are connected - and considering the impact of missing an email that likely will need to be a daily occurrence. We're already short on capacity, so adding this menial task that could be replaced by an automatic notification is a tough pill to swallow. 

I've been told posting here and upvoting is the best way to get a feature added, so I'm crossing all my digits you'll see this one.

We have many Google accounts being checked directly by Zendesk, and periodically they each become disconnected. We have to then go through and reconnect each one. It's a major problem when this happens. I understand that the disconnection is often or usually on the Google side, but we really need a clear, immediate notification of the event. An email sent to each administrator would work quite well. Adding a red flag on the settings icon would help, too.

An email alert would be best for this, at a minimum as it can be a major issue when it happens after hours or on weekends etc when the administrators are not actively using ZenDesk to know of an issue. An email alert could offer a quick remedy to help us provide better customer service vs unneccessary lag due to us not knowing there is an issue. 

At a minimum an alert within ZenDesk is needed - not just a manual check of the status page. 

This urgently needs to be added as it is vital to have connected emails for processes to work. 

Manually checking daily is another "to-do" that I'd like to avoid. 

seconding everyone else on this thread - we manage multiple brands and multiple teams in zendesk, so we have a long list of unique gmail inboxes connected in zendesk that we rely on. it's definitely not feasible for us to log in to each individual gmail inbox and set up forwarding for a potential notification that might go to that inbox (though as noted, it seems like that doesn't even happen any longer). 

as also other commenters have noted - how did yall build an admin notification for social integrations, but not for email integrations??? we need to see an admin email get sent any time there's an issue with an integrated email, as it is critical to any business that uses the email connectors. why do all of us have to advocate for such a simple, critical feature and to receive no support from ZD in seeing this feature get built soon?  

Following up to add to the votes to have this feature added. It's disheartening to see it impact so many fellow users, and that this issue was raised 4 years ago and has still not been addressed in any updates or roadmaps. We recently found that we had 8 emails disconnected, and when we reconnected them, it was discovered that about 1000 contacts had gone unanswered. Fingers crossed this feature gets added soon!

Upvoting as well.  Given that external email addresses are required to support users and are ostensibly another in-road that needs to be up and running, and given that an alert message is generated within the "Email" channel page itself, it seems straightforward that this alert could be populated to the home screen of admins, or an email could be sent out to admin@zendesk-domain.com when the alert on that email channel page is generated.

I agree with Brianna and company that email integrations should have built-in admin notifications.  

The email channel is not otherwise scalable.  If there is no current programmatic product-level solution, are there any DevOps / API level workarounds that could be developed for individual accounts? 

This is a MUST!

We've been hit several times by this and it's not always a quick fix. We are manually checking the inboxes to verify they're connected and recently found another issue were a user added the same email address as one of our imported boxes as a customer which prevented that inbox from being synced at all. 

We should always be notified when an inbox is set up to import all messages and is not being imported, regardless of the reason. We can't fix what we don't know is broken and this is sort of the core feature of the system. 

We just got hit with this, nothing has changed it seems. Thanks to everyone that commented above, well said.

As the person with Security and Operations responsibility at my company, this is an absolute must and a real opportunity to provide a useful operational metric. 

Seems like it could be done via statuspage pretty simply. Just "Is my email connector working?", can I receive Support email requests from the primary linked account. 

I spent a fair amount of time looking through the API and it is not focused on operations, but more towards SLA, agent metrics, capabilities, statuses. 

Please, please we would support you adding endpoints that can be useful for us that keep the systems running, we are not quite as interested in the various many, many other channels if I can't maintain visibility on one of the primary functions of the service, email support - thanks!

Email notifications would be acceptable as well.

+1: This should be prioritised.

@gorka does Zendesk have any plans to create such a feature to alert Zendesk admins when a connected email account fails authentication or disconnects via email, in-app or other means?

Thank-you everybody for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. This has been added to our backlog for possible future inclusion in the product. We have no ETA for when we might be able to consider developing it as a feature. We will likely regard this as part of a larger set of notification changes.

We are going to leave this post open for comments to allow others to leave their feedback and to describe their use-cases, though please note as stated in our Community Guidelines that we can not commit to prioritizing any one piece of feedback we receive.

Thank you again for being a valuable customer with Zendesk.

Wild that this has been requested since 2019 with this many comments and likes but nothing has been done. 

I was directed to comment here by support, so here I am. This is a serious need for gmail users. No one wants an admin to have to monitor this daily.  The settings tab shows the error, so just show that error on the main page like a banner so that users can see it too. 

+1.  This makes for a terrible customer and employee experience.  It needs to be addressed (though I have zero confidence it actually will be).

+1, this is a problem. Why wouldn't we get a notification that we have an issue with the emails getting moved over into Zendsk to become tickets? Isn't that the point of Zendesk? We get tickets, and we take care of our customers. 

+1 for this as it happened several times for us recently

+1, would be very convenient. Have missed over a 100 e-mails due to this.