complaint : stop this unpaid branding/advertising for freshdesk

  • 14 December 2013
  • 29 replies
  • 236 views

It is bad enough that all of my helpdesk correspondence is being sign with :  from paul "via freshdesk" and not with "from paul via cinemaplugins.com"




Now I have noticed that all my forum entries and solutions are being labeled as being from Freshdesk via google.

My solutions are not from freshdesk and my forum is not the freshdesk forum!


I am paying good money for freshdesk and everywhere I look, I am advertising freshdesk and not my own portal !!!! It looks extremely tacky and as if I am on a free platform. some of my clients dont know if I am cinemaplugins or freshdesk. I got a client addressing me as freshdesk !!

This has to stop.it is unbacceptable for a paid solution. I do not want to advertize for freshdesk, I dont need this branding confusion and I find it beyond cheeky that freshdesk is doing this to the SEO for what is essentialy my forum,my solution and my work. I am not freshdesk and I dont want to be branded as such.the damage is already done.


I see no way to prevent this via the admin settings and this practice has to stop.





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29 replies

Hi Paul,


I apologize for this. I understand that this looks very unprofessional. This was not intentional and is definitely an oversight on our part. We will get down to fixing this soon. Please give me a little time. Once again, my sincere apologies. 

Hi Paul,


I'm Sophia and I take care of SEO here at Freshdesk. Firstly, really sorry for putting you through this. I spent some time on the details and realize that there are a few action items for us that will improve things, but I first want to immediately help you fix your portal.


The reason "Helpdesk - Freshdesk" or "Freshdesk" appears in the search results 


Google search results depend on a lot of criteria. In your case, c4d is being treated as a sub-domain of Freshdesk (c4d.freshdesk.com) and therefore you see the 'Freshdesk' association in the search results. So the best way to avoid this would be to have your own CNAME i.e. support.c4d.com (or) support.cinemaplugin.com. Please refer to this article on getting your own custom Support URL to enable such.


I believe the above would solve the problem, however again, this is depending on how soon Google crawls and indexes your new support URL. I'm afraid we're both very dependent on Google on all this.


Also, please make use of the "Meta tags for search engines" section. You'll find this in the edit mode for every solution article, at the bottom of the page.



 


In this section, ensure you specify the required title, keeping the 70 character limit. Google generally populates the content in your page's title tag in its search results. However, when the title exceeds 70 characters, Google tries to truncate your title and add something that it considers relevant. Once again, this might have also contributed to the search results that we see today. By filling in the "Meta tags for search engine" section, not only could you solve your search results issue, but also get an SEO edge over your competitors. 


Once again our sincere apologies. Also, we are working on a few things that will improve the Google search experience for your solutions, I will make it a point to reach out and let you know.


Sincerely,

Sophia

This doesn't seem to address the first problem reported, namely that in gmail a support response shows with "via freshdesk" behind the from address.
Google has this to say about it:
"I'm a sender and I don't want my recipients to see the "via" link. What can I do?

Gmail checks whether emails are correctly authenticated. If your messages are sent by a bulk mailing vendor or by third-party affiliates, please publish an SPF record that includes the IPs of the vendor or affiliates which send your messages and sign your messages with a DKIM signature that is associated with your domain."
---

After adding the SPF record the response is indeed no longer caught in spam. The "via freshdesk" still shows up. Any suggestions to fix this?

 

Hi Henk


via Freshdesk.com will always come in the Mails because you're using our Mail Service to Send/Receive Emails to your clients and we make use of a 3rd party provider - Sendgrid for this.


We are coming up with Custom Mailbox support, where you can configure your own IMAP/SMTP and this via Freshdesk.com will not come up


We hope to bring this Mailbox feature soon, no ETA


thanks
Vijay

Since today an hour ago I joined this FreshDesk and I do not exactly know how it works and whatway it works. Iam a fresher please help me.

Thank you,

Sincerely,
Venkatesh M
 

 

Userlevel 4
Badge +8

Hey Venkatesh, 


Thank you for signing up for Freshdesk!


One of our agents will be getting in touch with you real soon to help you show around the product!


Hope you have loads of fun using Freshdesk.


Cheers,

Anna

Thanks for the reply Vijay.


I beg to differ. I know that emails are send by your mail server. According to Google, by adding your mail server (email.freshdesk.com) to be included in the domain SPF record (eg, SPF include:email.freshdesk.com) we authorize your mail server to send emails on behalf of our domain. With this, Google no longer treats your mail server as 'foreign' and should no longer show the 'via freshdesk' at the recipient.


The thing that is unclear to me is that Google also talks about signing messages with DKIM. I do seem a DKIM record included by your email server but its not clear if this is sufficient or another condition.


If we can resolve this then all complaints are laid to rest. Wouldn't that be nice? :)

Thanks,
Henk



Any updates on DKIM setup ?

Is there any updates on the DKIM setup? My company have purchased the Estate plan and it is ridiculous that we are unable to remove the "via freshdesk.com" from emails that we send out.

What is the update for DKIM?

I Agree with everyone else, that DKIM should be part of service. It's a standard practice and every company we've worked with had DKIM/SPF support by default. 


+1 for DKIM records!


Dear Freshdesk,


Got a couple of questions

1. We afraid our emails sent through freshdesk will be blocked by receiver's server because of mismatching "From domain" and the actual freshdesk domain. I have set up SPF following your tutorial. But how can we verify that it's actually working?


2. Is there a way to add DKIM as suggested by Google to further remove the via Freshdesk link? We don't mind Freshdesk advertise at the bottom of our emails, since we are on the sprout plan and it's absolutely fair. But the via freshdesk link does confuse customers. At least, let us know if this is even possible such that we won't waste time hunting for solutions. 


Please advice. Thank you!

Jack


+1 for allowing DKIM signing of messages or allowing us to use our own SMTP service.


https://agari.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202952629-How-can-I-get-my-third-party-senders-DMARC-compliant-

makes a good summary of the situation


@Vijay, using sendgrid as a 3rd party is good thing, and not an excuse not to implement DKIM :

by delegating a subdomain to freshdesk, you could easily generate DKIM for us.


DKIM is not an option, it's a mandatory security feature , and 'via freshdesk' message in gmail is not an advertisement : It's a security alert, saying there is no proof the message is legit.


@Freshdesk please provide an official answer about this issue.


Regards,

- Arnaud



Looks like Freshdesk doesn't care at all from Adam about this issue! I'm not impressed...

 


Happiness is the new satisfaction , or is it ?


Has there been any update on this issue?

this has improved.

a google search no longer reports a solution on my helpdesk, as if it where from freshdesk.


the issue with emails is not resolved, and correspondence is too loaded with "freshdesk" 


Surely the email portion of this can be solved by using custom mail settings, I know this is a feature of the Forest Plan but opening this up to all paid plans would remove this issue entirely for those that have a preference.


We have it set up to send and receive via an Office 365 account and this works really well for us and presents our business much more professionally as we too were not that happy about the Freshdesk reference. Of note, this was not very visible to Outlook users but in GMail it is very obvious.


Worth thinking about as an option..




What's the ETA for the DKIM? If this will not be there asap, I will definitely stop the trial and move to Zendesk.


Hi Allan,


Sorry for the delayed response here.


We have rolled out custom mail box feature using which you could overcome the DKIM issue. Custom mail box feature gives you the ability to send and receive emails using your own email servers. Please refer to the link below for more instructions on setting up custom mailbox,


https://support.freshdesk.com/solution/articles/195170-using-custom-email-servers-to-send-and-receive-support-emails


With regards to the DKIM setup, We are yet to roll out the specific feature. We will keep you posted on the progress. 


Will this get rolled out to plans other than Forest? this is an issue that impacts all Freshdesk users and seems ridiculous to only make it available on the most expensive plan.


Agree with Carl Taylor.  It's seems ridiculous to make this available only to the most expensive plan.  I had a paid plan but I discontinued because I did not have the option to use my own servers.  If this option is rolled out to other plans I will come back.


Userlevel 4
Badge +12

Hello Everyone,




We're really sorry to keep you waiting but we've worked on the option to use DKIM as an add-on feature for any plan. If you would like to get more information about the DKIM setup, please shoot an E-Mail to support@freshdesk.com and we would be happy to assist you.




Cheers!



Hello all,




Am happy to let you all know that we have just released the ability to digitally sign emails sent from Freshdesk for all plans. For more information, please read the following article - https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/223779-digitally-sign-emails-with-dkim-




Thanks,

Sudha