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Zendesk vs Outlook Reactions

  • March 6, 2024
  • 8 replies
  • 0 views
D

Hi everyone,

Not sure if this is the right place to share this "bug" or if it has already been shared, but I couldn't find anything regarding it.

Often people in my organization tag me in tickets when they need additional support, I get an email to let me know and I jump in the tickets and normally answer in an internal comment.

Recently in one of these cases, after leaving my comment, I went to archive the email, but before doing so, I mistakenly reacted to that email in Outlook.

Today I found out that when I reacted to that email, it was commented publicly in the ticket, as you can see in the image below.

Does anyone know a way to prevent this from happening within Zendesk? Or is this something the Zendesk team is aware of and has plans to address it?

 

    8 replies

    D
    • Dainne
    • March 8, 2024

    Hi Daniel! 

    This looks to be an expected behavior at the moment wherein Outlook react emojis are reopening tickets in Zendesk & are getting added as a public comment. 

    In terms of it being a public comment, for that we don't have any control of it at the moment. But in terms of preventing tickets from reopening due to the react emoji, we can only provide a workaround.

    This might be possible to do using a trigger that has the comment text | contains at least one of the following words condition that includes the emojis from Outlook. And in the trigger's action body, you can set the ticket status to solved or some other status other than open.

     


     Hope this helps!

    Rom11
    • Rom11
    • November 25, 2024

    This is not a good enough work around - as on top of the status change it also enforces an SLA change. 

     

    It would have been much better if you would have supported the “x-ms-reactions: disallow” tag in your outgoing emails or offer another solution to better handle these 

    Melissa13
    • Melissa13
    • February 4, 2025

    Chiming in here to agree that using reactions is becoming more common at my organisation. I'm not sure what I want to happen with reactions, but it's definitely not needed for everyone to get an email when someone just sends a reaction.

    Elaine14
    • Elaine14
    • November 7, 2025
    Hi Melissa,
     
    Thanks for sharing your perspective. I understand how frequent notifications from reactions can become overwhelming, especially if everyone receives an email each time a reaction is added.
     
    Currently, Zendesk treats Outlook reactions to emails linked to tickets as actual comments, which can trigger notifications and updates in the ticket. This behavior can indeed lead to unexpected email traffic.
     
    While there isn’t a built-in way yet to customize or limit reaction-triggered notifications, we’re actively gathering feedback from the community to improve this experience. I’d recommend submitting feedback through Zendesk’s feedback channels as well, so it can help shape future enhancements.
     
    In the meantime, some teams find it helpful to establish guidelines around reactions or use internal comments selectively to manage notification noise.
     
    Thanks again for weighing in!
    Jake12
    • Jake12
    • November 17, 2025

    We are also running into this issue, and it's especially frustrating when we have contractual SLAs with our customers, as these useless message still require a response to stop the Next Reply Time metric.

    I created feedback on this per Elaine' suggestion: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/1260801325369 

    Elaine14
    • Elaine14
    • December 18, 2025
    Hi Jacob,
     
    Thank you for sharing your experience, and I completely understand how frustrating it can be to deal with message types that inadvertently impact your Next Reply Time metric, especially when you have contractual SLAs with customers.
     
    I appreciate you creating feedback on this issue—it’s valuable for helping us prioritize improvements. The challenge you’re facing highlights the importance of refining how certain notifications and message types are treated in relation to SLAs.
     
    While we don’t yet have a built-in solution to exclude these notifications from affecting SLA metrics, please know that your feedback is being actively monitored, and we’re looking into ways to improve this down the line.
     
    Thanks again for bringing this to the community’s attention, and please don’t hesitate to share any additional insights or suggestions you may have.
    D
    • Denis11
    • January 16, 2026

    Hello, 

     

    We are meeting the same issues with Followers.

    It's very ennoying, and we don't know what to do with this.

    Is Zendesk has a RoadMap or a Workaround to solve this?

     

    Thanks

    Roman22
    • Roman22
    • March 16, 2026

    What is the status on this? Has ZD made an effort to rectify this issue? There should be no reason an emoji should trigger a reopening ZD ticket.  It's getting extremely frustrating, especially when in some case ZD tickets impact performance reviews. Has there been a resolution? Please advise. 

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