Could FD Support possibly weigh in again on this subject? The company I just joined says they turned of Email ticketing because of rampant loops and multiple tickets for the same issue. This was less than a year ago and it's been five years since the last comment on this thread. I'd like to turn email ticketing back on, but before I do I need to reassure my team that we can minimize the risk of hundreds of extraneous tickets.

What strategies does FD recommend for avoiding loops? 

Are there any other mitigation strategies that FD has implemented like the one Vijay mentioned 6 years ago?

What are other companies doing on their Service Desk to prevent or mitigate duplicate or erroneous email-to-ticket problems?

Any help or guidance would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Josh

Thanks Thriyam, I will contact you directly by email.

This isn't a Freshdesk specific comment, having worked with many email ticket/case systems in the past this is an age old problem. You can put defensive rules on the provider side to detect certain subject titles and sender attributes in order to prevent multiple ticket creation, almost like to trying to treat it as a DNS attack. 

In my experience though it can still happen even via human error so my approach is to once a loops is spotted deactivate the auto response momentarily to break the loop. In our FD instance we also haven't used the platform wide notification we've built dispatcher rules at group level, so if the loop is in one group, we can turn that one off without affecting all customers.  

One way to deal with this is what platforms like Desk.com do ( https://support.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1167831-preventing-an-email-war-email-loop ), namely, have a configurable minimum time interval between successive automatic 'new ticket created' email notifications sent to the same recipient.( requester/CC ). However, I cannot understand their insistence on suggesting 24 hours as a minimum for this interval - the number seems excessive.

Are there any dispatcher rules that we can create to stop this kind of attacks? 

Hello Freshdesk Support,

We had a loop incident a few days ago: someone sent a message to our organization's email address and we use Freshdesk's autoreply to send a basic acknowledgment. The external sender received our auto-reply and their system began generating their own tickets which auto-replied to our auto-replies etc. until ~1400 messages accumulated in our Freshdesk portal and we turned off our Freshdesk autoreplies to break the loop. Attached is a sample of a loop ticket that arrived in our Freshdesk.

I have sent a message to the original sender to notify them of what happened in case they can adjust their settings.

I'm writing to ask: what settings can I change in our Freshdesk configuration, or what new Freshdesk features can you add, in order to avoid future loops?

Thank you.

Hi all, any update on the issue explained above? We occasionally experience the exact problem. Surely there is a way that FD would be able to detect and prevent this?

Thanks,

Regards,