Categories Community English Sign in TICKETING SYSTEM Support help Zendesk help Support Using Support ticketing system Email Using the allowlist and blocklist to control access to Zendesk Support Anton de Young Edited 1 month ago Follow Quick Look: Admin Center > People > Configuration > End users You can control access to your Zendesk by adding end users' email addresses and domains to your blocklist and allowlist. Using the blocklist, you can prevent specific users, or sets of users, from registering and submitting support requests. Using the allowlist, you can allow specific users, or sets of users, to access your Zendesk and submit support requests. This article contains the following sections: About the blocklist and allowlist Setting up your blocklist and allowlist allowlist and blocklist usage examples About the blocklist and allowlist The blocklist and allowlist can help you create rules for accepting, suspending, and rejecting users' emails. Any email that is suspended because of the blocklist will be added to the suspended queue and flagged. If you have set up user mapping, any email domains you add to the allowlist will automatically be included (see Automatically adding users to organizations based on their email domains). Your allowlist will automatically override your blocklist. For example, if you blocked a specific domain, but allowed a user with that email domain, they will be given access. Note: If you blocklist a user that is CC'd on a ticket, they will not be removed from existing tickets. If an email address is blocked, an agent can still add the user as a CC, and they will still receive CC email notifications. To prevent CC notifications, you will need to suspend the user. The email address will still be visible, but agents cannot add the user to the ticket. Depending on how your Zendesk is set up, you can use the blocklist and allowlist to apply additional settings to control who can access your Zendesk. If your Zendesk permits anyone to submit tickets, such as in open support type, you can use the blocklist to filter out spam email addresses and domains (see Suspending a user in the Zendesk Agent Guide). Any ticket from a user or domain on the blocklist is automatically sent to the suspended tickets queue. If you require users to register, you can use the blocklist, so only approved email address and domains can submit support requests and authenticate accounts. The blocklist and allowlist feature contains rules you can combine to easily restrict access. See the section below for a list of the available blocklist and allowlist rules. Setting your blocklist and allowlist Before setting up your blocklist and allowlist, you should consider the following rules: You can enter up to 10,000 characters in each of the allowlist and blocklist fields. To allow all users to submit tickets to your Zendesk, except those added to the blocklist, leave the allowlist blank. To suspend ticket submissions from all users, except for those added to the allowlist, add a wildcard(*) in your blocklist. Important: The wildcard will send tickets from every user not added to the allowlist into the suspended tickets queue, and prevents new users from creating accounts. Use keywords or symbols with a blocklist or allowlist entry to make the restrictions broader, or more specific: To block or allow an entire email domain, do not include the "@" symbol. An email domain will not be successfully added to the allowlist or blocklist with "@". To completely block support requests from specific users, enter the keyword reject: in front of an email address or domain list in the blocklist. Tickets will not be added to the suspended tickets queue and there will be no record of the ticket in your Zendesk. To block or allow an entire email domain, do not include the "@" symbol. An email domain will not be successfully added to the allowlist or blocklist with "@". Being placed on the allowlist does not allow users to override their tickets from being suspended if the subject contains the text "Out of Office" or if the ticket comes from an email flagged as a "do not reply" address. To completely block support requests from specific users, enter the keyword reject: in front of an email address or domain list in the blocklist. Tickets will not be added to the suspended tickets queue and there will be no record of the ticket in your Zendesk. Note: reject: only applies to support requests and doesn't prevent users from creating an account in your Zendesk. To edit your blocklist and allowlist In Admin Center, click the People icon () in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users. In the Anybody can submit tickets section, select Enabled. This setting is required to use your blocklist or allowlist. Enter your allowlist and blocklist settings. You can view some of the common blocklist and allowlist examples in the section below. If you are adding multiple email addresses or domains, separate with a space. Click Save tab. Allowlist and blocklist usage examples You can use a combinations of the blocklist and allowlist rules to ensure you are permitting access or blocking the correct users. This section contains some usage examples you can replicate for your own Zendesk. Approve a domain, suspend all other users You can allow specific domains access to your Zendesk by adding the domain in the allowlist and suspend all users with a different email domain by adding a wildcard (*) in the blocklist. In the example below, only email from the domain mondocampcorp.com will be permitted access. allowlist: mondocamcorp.com blocklist: * If you want to allow more than one domain access, you can enter multiple domains separated by a space. In the example below email from the domains mondocamcorp, comdocam, and mondostore are permitted and all other users will be suspended. allowlist: mondocamcorp.com mondocam.com mondostore.com blocklist: * Approve a domain, but suspend specific email addresses with the domain You can prevent a specific email address with an allowed domain from accessing your Zendesk by using the suspend keyword. In the example below, only email from gmail.com is given access, except for the email address randomspammer@gmail.com. allowlist: gmail.com blocklist: * suspend:randomspammer@gmail.com Approve a domain, but reject specific email addresses and domains within it Similar to the previous example, you can block specific email addresses from using an allowed domain by entering their email address in the blocklist. You can use the reject keyword to prevent a user's tickets from being adding to your Zendesk at all. In the example below, only email from gmail.com is accepted. All tickets from other email domains are sent to the suspended tickets cue, except for the email address randomspammer@gmail.com. Email from randomspammer@gmail.com will be rejected completely, and the ticket will not be recorded in your Zendesk. allowlist: gmail.com blocklist: * reject:randomspammer@gmail.com Note: If you are still getting requests from blocked domains or email addresses, we recommend that you contact Zendesk Customer Support, so we can help you diagnose the problem. This can be the result of email spoofing. Approve all, but reject specific email addresses and domains Unlike the examples above, you also have the option of allowing all users to register, except for specific email address and domains. To allow all users to register, you can leave the allowlist blank, then enter any blocked users. In the example below, everyone can access your Zendesk, except for randomspammer@gmail.com and megaspam.com. Since the reject: keyword is used, all email from those accounts will be blocked completely and the ticket will not be recorded in your Zendesk. allowlist: blocklist: reject:randomspammer@gmail.com reject:megaspam.com Suspend support request tickets from specific email addresses or domains Simply adding an email address or domain to your blocklist suspends tickets from those users, but only if those tickets are submitted through the email channel. allowlist: blocklist: suspend:randomspammer@gmail.com suspend:megaspam.com Yes 21 No 16 Return to top 16 Comments Sort by Mandy Maleta 10 months ago Comment actions Just to confirm - I can list specific emails in my allow list and put an * in my blocklist? By doing so only those email within the allowlist can submit support request via web widget and submit request link in help center and all others will not be able to.....? I ask because I tried this specific setup with one of my other emails and my tickets are still getting through. They aren't even going to a "suspended" queue. Yes 0 No Brett Bowser 10 months ago Zendesk Community Manager Comment actions Hey Mandy, That should be the case. If you add * to the blocklist then you would only be allowing ticket creating from users that are in the allowlist field. If this isn't happening on your end we may need to create a ticket on your behalf so we can look into some examples. Is this still the case for you? Yes 0 No Jozsef Hajdu 6 months ago Comment actions hi, we would like to block entire domain, but allow one email from that domain and everybody else. For now I have set: in the approve field like this: email@domain.com, in the blocked field reject:domain.com But it is not working, it is still blocking all mails from this domain. What should I do? Yes 0 No Sean Cusick 6 months ago Comment actions Hi Jozsef, You should be able to remove the reject: portion from the blocklist. This will cause emails from that domain to be suspended, but it should allow the one address that you have in your allowlist to be processed as expected. Any time you use the reject: syntax it will reject all traffic from that domain. Yes 0 No Jozsef Hajdu 6 months ago Comment actions I have removed the permalink, and it is not working the suspension. It allowed from my email address to create a ticket Yes 0 No Sean Cusick 6 months ago Comment actions Hi Jozsef, Because assisting you further will require us to inspect your account setup and to examine specific examples, could you open a ticket with us at support@zendesk.com so that we can investigate further? Thanks, Sean Yes 0 No Shelley Ryan 5 months ago Comment actions We get a TON of spam via Zendesk tickets, and I understand that using the "Mark as Spam" option not only deletes the ticket, it suspends the user to prevent further incoming messages from adding to the noise. My question is... when I need to add someone to the CC field on a ticket, all of those suspended people show up in the CC selection list (yes, flagged as suspended), which still makes it a pain in the butt to actually choose a "legit" customer or light agent. Is there ANY way to exclude the suspended offenders from appearing in the CC field? Yes 0 No Gab Guinto 5 months ago Zendesk Customer Care Comment actions Hi Shelley, I'm afraid this is the expected behavior, and that there's no workaround for this. The CC field will suggest users that are currently saved in your Zendesk, regardless if they're suspended or not. I agree that it might be convenient if suspended users will be excluded from the list; I encourage you to create a new post in the Support Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs. Thanks Shelley! Yes 0 No CATALYST Support 4 months ago Comment actions You cannot blacklist TLDs by themselves That's too bad, because we now get spam from @*.shop, with a constantly rotating number of domains under the .shop TLD. There is absolutely no reason why we would want to receive emails from anyone at .shop. Yes 0 No Pooja Palan 3 months ago Zendesk Product Manager Comment actions Hi Everyone, Thank you for all of your questions on the blocklist / allowlist settings. We love your feedback. If you have more product feedback on this topic, we'd like to hear from you! Please find some time to talk to our product directly at https://calendly.com/pooja-palan/30min?back=1&month=2021-08 Thanks! Yes 0 No Melody Quinn 2 months ago Comment actions When a specific email address or domain is on the blocklist, will it prevent them from creating an account in Guide or will it just prevent them from creating tickets? We are trying to prevent certain users from commenting in our community and help articles. We currently have our help site open to all users and use the web widget. All users can submit tickets through the web widget. They do not submit tickets through email. Yes 0 No Dave Dyson 2 months ago Zendesk Community Manager Comment actions Hi Melody, The blocklist only applies to the creation of tickets, but you can also suspend a user, which prevents them from logging in (and therefore posting or commenting in your help center and community): Suspending a user Yes 0 No Salih Özdemir 2 months ago Comment actions Hi, Is there any way to update allowlist/blocklist via API? Regards. Yes 2 No Josh McCrowell 7 days ago Comment actions If I've previously added a list of end users manually, and then later put a wildcard into the blocklist, will all end user tickets be automatically rejected? Yes 0 No Dave Dyson 7 days ago Zendesk Community Manager Comment actions Hi Josh, if there's a wildcard in your blocklist, then all end-user tickets will be rejected, except for end-users listed in the allowlist. Yes 1 No Josh McCrowell 7 days ago Comment actions Hi Dave, Thanks for the answer! Is there an intelligent way to transition my help center from being completely closed down (only adding end users one at a time) to having users in allowlisted domains sign up -- without totally blocking the end users we've already added? Yes 0 No Please sign in to leave a comment. Related articles Understanding and managing suspended tickets and spam Switching among Zendesk products Creating organizations Suspending a user Restricting access to Zendesk Support and your Help Center using IP restrictions Zendesk 989 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103 Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions | System Status Powered by Zendesk