Some replies to tickets have the wrong email address and are not received

[PHoughton]

We use Hubspot as a ticketing system so our users can email us at "support@ourdomain.com" and it creates a ticket in hubspot.

We can reply to these tickets through hubspot and the user receives the reply from "support@ourdomain.com".

They can in turn reply to this and it gets logged against the ticket.

We occasionally get contacted by a user saying they have replied, but we have not received the reply against the ticket. I have one such example from this week, and when the user replied, the email address "support=ourdomain.com@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com" was used. Emails to this address do not get received, and I am not sure why the user would have got this when they pressed reply.

The relevant settings I can see in my hubspot account are:

 - Hubspot fallback email is turned off

 - The "send from" details for the inbox are set to use "support@ourdomain.com" as the from address

I would love to understand why occasionally some of our customers' replies use a different email address and don't get received.

[PHoughton · Accepted solution]

I have finaly figured out what is going on here.

All our emails from Hubspot have the From address of "support=ourdomain.com@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com", and they all have a "Reply to" address of "support@ourdomain.com".

Most customers will use the "reply to" address when they hit reply in their email software, but some are replying to the from address.

This is caused by us not having our domain registered with Hubspot, and is hinted at here in Inbox settings:

This links to this page: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/marketing-email/manage-email-authentication-in-hubspot which shows the following, acknowledging that your custimers may have a negative experience:

Registering your domain with Hubspot is a premium feature and I am unclear if this can be done just for emails or if it involves hosting a website as well. In any case, I have not been impressed with the customer support we have received on this topic and we will be reviewing alternative ticketing systems for now.

If Hubspot needs to send our emails from their own domain, I don't understand why replies to that address aren't then routed back to us.

[PHoughton · Accepted solution]

I have finaly figured out what is going on here.

All our emails from Hubspot have the From address of "support=ourdomain.com@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com", and they all have a "Reply to" address of "support@ourdomain.com".

Most customers will use the "reply to" address when they hit reply in their email software, but some are replying to the from address.

This is caused by us not having our domain registered with Hubspot, and is hinted at here in Inbox settings:

This links to this page: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/marketing-email/manage-email-authentication-in-hubspot which shows the following, acknowledging that your custimers may have a negative experience:

Registering your domain with Hubspot is a premium feature and I am unclear if this can be done just for emails or if it involves hosting a website as well. In any case, I have not been impressed with the customer support we have received on this topic and we will be reviewing alternative ticketing systems for now.

If Hubspot needs to send our emails from their own domain, I don't understand why replies to that address aren't then routed back to us.

[TomM2 · Accepted solution]

Hey @PHoughton thanks for providing the information on this! It's good to know. 

Just to confirm, if you have starter or above you can connect your email sending domain to HubSpot, as per the guide you shared. You don't need to connect your website domain or anything like that to do it. It's basically just a connection and authorises HubSpot's servers to send emails on your behalf. So it'll stop any spam filters or anything like that and improves deliverability. From the warning it looks like that they're sending this from a HS domain specifically because you don't have your domain's email authetication setup in HubSpot. 

[PHoughton]

Ok, I have made a small breakthrough.

1. A user emailed us at our support address
2. We replied to that email - the from address was incorrect
3. The user reported to us that they had replied and we had not responded (we did not recieve it)
4. I have replied to that email again through Hubspot inbox, and the from address is still coming out incorrectly, so I can recreate this problem for this particular ticket.

This is the view in Hubspot, showing the from address should be correct:

And this is the view in the email client showing the incorrect From address:

[PHoughton]

I have inspected the email sent to a user in Hubspot, and it is showing the From address as correct. But when the user replied, it used the weird address: support=ourdomain.com@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com

[PHoughton]

I have found a second example of this happening. I can't see any pattern:

 - the email from Hubspot was sent from different users (one from my account and one from a colleague's)

 - they were sent to different customers from different organisations, but both emails had the from address: "support=ourdomain.com@bf.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com"

 - I can't find this address anywhere in Hubspot settings - I would guess this is an internal email address to the software, as it looks like an encoded version of our from address with some hubspot domain on the end

 - it is not our fallback address (which is in the format: support@XXXXXX.eu1.r.hubspot-inbox.com)

I don't understand where this email address is coming from.

I have checked the Inbox settings and the Ticket settings.

As I say, it is working correctly the vast majority of the time.

[TomM2]

That is strange, @PHoughton 

It's really hard to say without being able to see the emails. 

Were these send from a team email or an individual one? 

[PHoughton]

The customers have sent from an individual email address. When we reply through Hubspot, it should use the agent details as follows:

I'd be happy to provide more information or send you an email if it helps.

It seems likea bug in Hubspot to me, but when I contacted their Help team they told me to post here.

[TomM2]

Hey @PHoughton is there a pattern to the ones that are being sent from the fallback email? Are these all from a specific user in HS or did they have a specific source that created the ticket? 

The best way to find out what might be causing this would be to investigate what's different on these tickets compared to ones that have worked as expected.