A stranger’s first email shouldn’t always land straight in your ticket queue. Email intake includes a toggle that adds a one-time confirmation step for senders it doesn’t already recognize.
Where to find it
- Click the gear icon, then in the left-hand Settings navigation choose Channels, then open the Email intake sub-tab. Email intake must already be enabled — see “Turn emails into tickets (email intake)” if you haven’t set that up yet.
- Find the Let unknown senders open tickets by email checkbox, just below the forwarding address and its Copy/Regenerate buttons.
- Check or uncheck it. It saves immediately — there’s no separate Save button.
What “on” does (the default)
Any email address — known to you or not — opens a ticket the moment its message reaches your ingest address. This is the lowest-friction setting and is on by default when you first enable email intake.
What “off” does
A first-time sender — an email address with no existing customer record in this workspace — gets a one-time confirmation email instead of an instant ticket. Nothing is created until they click the link in that email; if they never click it, no ticket, and no clutter in your queue.
This only affects genuinely new senders. Anyone who already exists as a customer in your workspace — because they’ve emailed in before, submitted a request through the portal or the chat widget, or an agent added or imported them — goes straight to ticket creation as usual, even with this setting off. Essential Support already recognizes them, so there’s nothing to confirm.
When to turn it off
- Your public support address is getting cold outreach, spam, or bot traffic that keeps opening junk tickets.
- You’re running a private or invite-only support channel and only want vetted people able to open tickets by email.
- You’re investigating suspected spoofing or mail-loop traffic and want to slow down anything from an address you don’t already recognize while you sort it out.
What the sender sees when it’s off
Essential Support emails them a branded confirmation message with a link. Clicking it creates the ticket with their original subject and message intact, and also gives them a session so they can view the ticket in your portal going forward. The link expires after a set window, so a message that’s never confirmed simply never becomes a ticket.
This setting only changes behavior for email. Your portal’s and chat widget’s public contact forms are already verify-first for every submission — known customer or not — so this toggle has no effect on them.
Related: Turn emails into tickets (email intake).