In the email settings and mailbox, you can leave the agent group blank. However, to suppress the ticket creation email you will need to do a separate workflow automator. In the condition I would do Ticket Fields > To Email and then enter the email address you setup. The action would then be “skip new ticket email notifications.

If you have regular routing rules that would catch email tickets under normal circumstances and assign it, you can edit that automator to have to have it exclude ticket created to that email address or as part of that workflow above you can have it unassign the ticket.

To prevent forwarded tickets from being auto-assigned and auto-notified, you'll need to adjust the settings of your specific helpdesk or ticketing system

Yes, you can configure a rule or trigger to exclude forwarded tickets from auto-assignment and auto-responses. Use conditions like email source or subject tags to filter and apply custom behavior.

Got it, thanks for clarifying. That makes sense

Hi Luke,

Forwarded emails will still trigger ticket creation by default. However, most helpdesk systems don’t allow you to both create the ticket and completely bypass auto-assignment/auto-response without a custom rule. The usual workarounds are:

• Use a forwarding rule/mailbox filter so these specific emails are tagged differently (e.g. “Forwarded by agent”). Then you can exclude that tag/queue from auto-assignment and disable auto-reply.

• Check if your helpdesk supports workflow/automation rules — e.g. “If ticket source = Email Forward” → don’t send auto-response, assign to ‘Unassigned’ queue.

• If not supported natively, you may need an admin to create a custom automation or disable auto-response on that channel.

So short answer: yes, it’s possible in most systems, but you’ll need to set up a conditional rule rather than relying on the default email-to-ticket behavior.

More notes/resources I keep here: outdoorsearcher.com