Customer Agent Responding to Forwarder of Forwarded Emails Rather Than Original Sender

In the Help Desk configuration settings, you can toggle the option to have emails forwarded to your Help Desk email channel associated with the original sender, rather than the person that forwarded it.

Reference: Connect channels to help desk
If the same settings area, you can choose to assign tickets automatically to the HubSpot Customer Agent.
If you do this, the Customer Agent still replies to the person that forwarded the email, not the original sender. This seems to happen, even if the ticket associated to the correct contact (who originally sent the email).
As of today, the best workaround I have determined is to set the automatic assignment to none, and have a workflow that looks for Ticket Create Date is Known and Owner is Unknown and then branches based on if the Name of the ticket contains exactly FW:
Then, if it does, it does a round robin with our technical support team. If it doesn’t, it assigns it to the Customer Agent.
If it was forwarded, our team has to manually send the initial reply, and then hand it off to the Customer Agent if needed.
I’m curious if anyone has any knowledge of a better way around this. Or is this simply a feature request?

Hmmm, that’s definitely weird, and I apologize that I don’t know if this is working as intended or not.

Just earlier today I noticed this update to customer agent where you can set specific email addresses that Customer Agent won’t engage with, but when you do that “the Customer Agent automatically transfers the conversation to a human agent,” and it sounds like that isn’t what you want.

Based on the documentation you shared, it sounds to me like it should work the way you want it to. My intuition is that there’s some conflict in the settings, but I’m not sure the best way to troubleshoot that here on a public forum.

Hey @mfontana - thanks for posting in the Community!
In addition to @KyleJepson’s insight, I’d like to tag in some Community experts here to see what they’d recommend, if even just submitting this in our Ideas Forum. @karstenkoehler, @Anton, and @Lucila-Andimol - any thoughts on best practice(s) here?
Shane, Senior Community Moderator