Why is the customer email address changed using "+client.domain.name-via-support@my.company.domain"

Hi,

I noticed a strange behaviour with Zoho Desk that I don't quite understand.

I have customers that open tickets with their email addresses - that's fine. For instance "mike@foo.com".

My company has its support email address as simple as "support@barbaz.com".

When the ticket is first created, it's all fine, and the email address is displayed properly as follows:

Then I answer the ticket and it's still fine:

But then Mike responds again, and here his email address is changed!

At first, I didn't pay much attention to it because it was still working fine when we answer the ticket, Zoho Desk is apparently capable to re-build the proper client address to send the email as expected. But recently, I've had some cases where the email address wasn't replaced properly as in the original email, thus leading to an email delivery error (because of course "mike+foo.com-via-support@barbaz.com" doesn't exist in my company).

It's even more "dangerous" in fact because let's say there is actually a user in my company with an email address as "mike@barbaz.com". Then he will receive the email instead of the customer (because all that's after the "+" sign is just a convenient way to filter using a single email address), the customer won't, and there won't be any email delivery error to let us know this happened.

I really would like to understand why is that? Why is it happening apparently at random?

Note #1: my agents are using the Desk interface in the Bêta version. Since it's a front-end change, I don't expect it to have an impact on back-end processes (I guess the ticket responses are a back-end process).

Note #2: our customers are using a custom portal developed by my company, so we're using the Desk API to interact from this portal to actual Desk tickets. I've already asked them (the dev team in charge of this portal), but they don't touch anything related to the customer email address, they're not responsible for the whole "via" thing.

I'm currently very confused by this, and I would really appreciate to have better understanding of what's going on here.

Best regards,

Cyrille

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