Prioritize Bounced Email Notification

Hi Shawna.
I do appreciate the update, but pardon the immense level of skepticism I have to treat it with.  This particular thread is from 2017!  And that isn't even the oldest thread about the issue.  The first one I found is from 2014.  That is 10 years ago in case math is hard.  And almost every year there is a friendly “Hey folks, this is a high priority issue that we expect to have implimented by year's end.”  I would LOVE to hear an explanation as to why a feature that every other mail system I've seen has, is taking 10+ years to accomplish.  You are lucky I am not in charge of purchasing at my company.  Trust me, I will never recommend your product, despite its other fine features.

Here's a “greatest hits” compilation.

Posted Oct 30, 2014

So, I'm surprised I never thought of this until now, but it seems like an oversight to me. Maybe I'm missing something? Here's the scenario:

We have an environment where tickets are created using the API from a contact form on our site where the user enters their email address.

When an agent responds to the ticket, what if the email address the requester entered is wrong? If the message is rejected or bounced, the agent would never know! They would go on thinking this person is ignoring them and not have any sort of idea that the requester never got the message.

Can we add some way for Zendesk to notify the agent that the reply was not received? Would be pretty nifty.

Thanks!

Posted Apr 06, 2017

Hello,

I recently perused this support article about Zendesk's handling of bounced email notifications/undeliverable emails. I would like to ask that Zendesk prioritizes creation of a view, and/or agent notification when an email bounces, or the email address is undeliverable. Our organization is proactive on such matters, and we would like this feature ASAP.

Thank you,

Stephanie Smith 

Max McCal

Zendesk Product Manager

Apr 07, 2017

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Hey, Stephanie - This feature is planned. It's still a little ways out (we're focused on some security and reliability concerns in our email platform at the moment), but we have it in mind for the near future.

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Apr 26, 2018

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Hey Ben - 

It was in mind for the near future but I do not believe it has been built yet. I'll check in with the Product team to see what the status is. 

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Feb 19, 2019

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Hi Ben, 

My apologies! This one slipped through the cracks somehow. 

The product team is making several updates to workflows in Support over the coming year. They are currently evaluating the views functionality, but do not have specifics to share on whether they will be making any changes or adding any specifics around which view filters they may or may not be adding. 

Rachel Orio

Jul 06, 2021

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Hi Moshe,

This is currently being worked on, unfortunately, we are unable to provide more concrete detail yet but we are working towards a feature - Email Delivery Status - that will surface delivery status within the ticket. Stay tuned for the announcement on when this will be released.

Benjamin Kirsch

Zendesk Product Manager

Aug 04, 2021

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Hi everyone,

Thanks so much for your feedback here. We’re definitely aware of the need for this and it will be addressed as part of the Email Status project. We are currently in the discovery phase of Email Status and it will focus on surfacing deliverability statuses of emails within the Agent Workspace UI.

Thanks again for your feedback here and I’ll plan to check back in with a further update once we are closer to finishing our discovery work later this year.

Benjamin Kirsch

Zendesk Product Manager

Aug 08, 2023

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Hi all, thank you for your continued feedback on this feature request.  Wanted to let everyone know that this project, in which we will focus on surfacing email delivery information in Support, has been prioritized by leadership as a top project here at Zendesk, and is on our roadmap.  We are currently working on a technical implementation plan so please continue to add any feedback to this thread so we can track it. I’ll circle back here with more updates once that technical plan is done.  Thanks!

Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

May 15, 2024

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Hi everyone! I wanted to provide a quick update here. I spoke with our product teams who confirmed that this feature is still on the roadmap and in discovery for this year. I wanted to make sure folks following along knew that this was top of mind and being worked on. Thank you for your patience here and we look forward to having more information for you soon here! 

Hi Shawna,

I don't see any inappropiate critic in the posts here.

Perhaps some irony - but that only reflects the irony which a customer (this is us btw) definitely feel while following this thread and topic over the last decade.

I remember a time where we got bounce information and can handle it initiative.
Then, I think in ~2017 Zendesk launched an revised bounce feature thing. But it failed and has been deactivated some weeks later. 

Since then we are waiting for this feature…

Reminder: we're talking about a bounce notification. Every, EVERY!!! simple mail server gets this information.

Zendesk is a huge system with thousands of customers who have millions of customers and the central feature is to send an email - and there is no bounce notification???

I'm sorry, but this is a bad joke in my eyes.

I know a lot of Zendesk costumers who think like me, even if here in the forum just a small proportion if them made an input…

What shall we do? Another ten years of please please please it's IMPORTANT?

I would like to know, too, what the reasons has been over so many years not to implement such a simple but important feature.

If I would act like this with my tasks I would be unemployed within a short time…

Regards
Julian

Hi!

What is the latest update regarding your status since August 8, 2023? When will this be implemented?

One customer service inquiry was about a faulty claim. We answered in Zendesk, "Please contact this company, and they will refund this shortly."

The message above did not reach the user.

Is there any way we can set up triggers so that, for example, three internal Zendesk users (who work for us internally on customer service) would be notified every time an answer to a requester is blocked by the user's email provider or any time an answer from Zendesk has not been sent, where Zendesk can see that the message has not reached the requester?

The company I work for is also in great need of such functionality.

I've seen this thread for years.  Where is this on Zendesk priorities now?  7 years later

Hoping Zendesk sees this is a highly requested item and an important check point in the reliability of their product and their accuracy rate.  ETA would be much appreciated on this roll out.

We need that functionality as well. We might be forced to leave Zendesk if we have no failsafe for a misspelled recipient's address.

Potential partial workaround for people using API/automations: loop end users, loop their identities, add undeliverable identities to an array (i.e. objects with the user id, identity id, and identity value).

How it works: We have a Tray.io workflow that generates proactive tickets to existing customers added to a list after routine events. After generating the ticket it calls the Zendesk API to find out if the 'undeliverable_count' isn't zero for any of the identities associated with an end user, and if any are it will add that to a list, which is included in a workflow run results emails so we can debug separately. 

This is kind of a partial, brute force bounce reporting workaround that provides the number of times a soft-bounce response was received at that address. Caveat - I don't think that the count will include the results of the ticket during the run, but I added a manual time delay between ticket creation and the identity check to see if that helps.

I'm hoping there's a way to just query the identities on their own, but I don't think you can without looping through however many tens of thousands of end users you might have. I posted to find out -  

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/7739697023642-Undeliverable-identities-identity-API-end-point

@benjamin24 any update on the above? Still a big issue within our organisation.