Using simplified email threading (Early Access Program)

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Simplified email threading improves the way that email notifications appear to your end users and agents in third-party email applications such as Gmail. It removes redundant or duplicate formatting such as avatars and dotted lines. It allows multiple messages in an email thread to fold.

Note: To use the features described in this article, you must be in the Simplified Email Threading early access program (EAP). This is currently a closed EAP, meaning Zendesk is restricting access to customers whose accounts meet certain criteria. If you are interested, fill out the request form. If you’re accepted into the EAP, you will receive an email with more information.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to the simplified email look and feel, and how end users and agents interact with the new email threading UI. It includes the following sections:

• The end user experience
• The agent experience
• Folding long email threads

Related articles:

• Migrating to simplified email threading (Early Access Program)
• Opting out of simplified email threading (Early Access Program)

The end user experience

In this section, we’ll show you examples of how ticket notification emails may appear to your end users after you opt in to simplified email threading, along with descriptions of key parts of each notification.

Request received notification

In the ticket below, the end user receives an email notification that their support request has been received:

In this example, the trigger that sends out this notification does not include a comment placeholder in its email body. If the original trigger included a placeholder that was replaced with {{latest_comment_html}}, after migration the notification would display the latest public comment, as shown in the next screenshot.

Ticket update notifications

The example below shows an email notification sent to an end user, where the latest comment was made by an agent. Note that the agent's name and associated brand are shown:

And here is an email notification sent to an end user, where the comment was made by an end user. The commenter's name is shown only under the latest comment:

Adding a new end user as a CC

When an agent leaves a comment on a ticket and adds a user as a CC, that comment is shown, along with the three most recent public comments, to give the newly-added user better context for the ticket being addressed:

The agent experience

Email notifications sent to the agent include more information about the ticket, including metadata the end user does not have access to.

The example notification below is sent to an agent, Austin, because the ticket being referenced has been assigned to the agent’s group.

In addition to the latest comment (in this case, the original support request), a ticket info card is shown, with key information about the ticket as well as a button the agent can click to view the ticket in Support:

Internal notes and warnings can also appear in notifications received by agents. In the screenshot above, agent Jenny Kim hasn’t been included in the ticket, but has permission to view it and leave comments. She left an internal note for her fellow agents, which is indicated above her comment. And, because she had not been added to the ticket before commenting, a warning appears at the top of the comment, letting agents know her status.

For comparison, here's a similar notification with the old email experience:

Folding long email threads

When enabled, email threads that include five or more messages will “fold” so that they are easier to use and take up less space. Here’s an example of what a folded email thread looks like in Gmail:

Notice the following things about this thread:

• At the top of the thread, a preview of the original message appears (meaning the first line of the message is showing).
• On the left side of the thread, the number 3 appears, indicating how many older messages are hidden. You can click the number to expand these messages. By default, only the latest comment is fully displayed.

The “Request received” message is still handled as a separate message in the inbox. Only the subsequent messages will be threaded together. For example: