How Does Email Forwarding Works In Customer Support Ticketing Systems?

Question

When you sign up for customer support ticketing systems like Zendesk they provide you with a unique email address something like [email protected] where you can forward emails from customers to this address and these forwarded emails are converted to tickets in Zendesk.

1. How do they generate such unique emails to each business that signs up? Do they use some form of internal email server that generate these emails addresses?

2. How do they receive the forwarded emails in the Zendesk application in order to convert them to tickets?

Answer 1

1. This type of service usually works by running a standard mail server instance, configuring it to query the list of valid customer names more or less directly from the database where new signups are stored. Most major mail server software can easily be configured to query from various RDBMS such as postgresql.

2. Upon receipt of a message, this message is fed into some facility in the ticket system that parses the mail body and decides whether to append to existing tickets, or to create a new one, usually based on mentioned ticket id. Triggering this is a standard feature in all major mail servers, too. Though the specific interfaces differ, it can be as simple as instructing the server to execute a program and write to its standard input.