Configuring and Enabling the Auto Remove Attachments App and Running the Redaction Task

The next step is to configure the app.

Auto Remove Attachments can be run in three modes:

• Open Tickets
• Closed Tickets
• Redaction Task

Each of the three modes is initially disabled and you need to configure them and you can enable or disable all or any of these.

Open Tickets and Closed Tickets are configured to run automatically and these two modes are included in the free 14-day Trail and in the standard subscription to Auto Remove Attachments (refer to Subscribing to Auto Remove Attachments, Managing your Billing).

For full details, refer below to Configuring Open Tickets and Configuring Closed Tickets.

Redaction Task is a separate once-off subscription which gives you a 30-day pass to use this function. This can be used to remove all of the attachments in your archive of tickets going back in time, usually used on closed tickets (refer to Subscribing to Auto Remove Attachments, Managing your Billing). You can run the Redaction Task as many times as needed, with different settings.

For full details, refer below to Configuring the Redaction Task.

In this Article
Displaying the Configuration Settings for Auto Remove Attachment
Configuring Open Tickets
    Tag Filter
    File Extensions
    Comments to Redact
    Inline Images
    Add private comment
    Enabling Open Tickets
    Saving the Open Tickets
Configuring Closed Tickets
    Retention Period
    Ticket Tags
    File Extensions, Comments to Redact and Inline Images in Closed Tickets
    Enabling Closed Tickets
    Saving the Closed Tickets
Configuring the Redaction Task
    Ticket Status
    Date Range
    Ticket Tags, Comments to Redact, File Extensions and Inline Images in the Redaction Task
Running the Redaction Task
    Re-running the Redaction Task

Displaying the Configuration Settings for Auto Remove Attachment

1. When you have connected, activated and authorized the Auto Remove Attachments app, open your Zendesk Agent Dashboard.
2. On the left-hand side of the Dashboard, click the Auto Remove Attachments icon in the sidebar.
   
   

Or, from an open Swifteq app, click the Switch between Swifteq Zendesk Apps button in the top right menu and select the Auto Remove Attachments app.


The Configuration Settings display.

Configuring Open Tickets

Open Tickets runs every 3 minutes and checks the following tickets:

• Tickets with the status "New", "Open", "Pending" or "Solved".
• Tickets that have one or more attachments.
• Tickets which include the Zendesk Tag as specified in the Tag Filter in the Configuration.

Tag Filter

Tag Filter is mandatory for the Open Tickets configuration.

The name of the Tag that you use will be what you have decided for your own installation. In the examples in this Help, this is shown as "please_redact" but you can set this Tag according to your own requirements. 

The Tag can be applied to tickets manually by your support team and you can also set up a Trigger or an Automation in Zendesk to add the tag. For example, you can to automatically add the relevant Tag to tickets with the status "Solved" 24 hours after that status has been set. This would automatically redact the attachments in any Solved tickets, 24 hours after they are set to Solved. Refer to Setting up Zendesk Triggers and Automations and the Tag that will be used.

Enter the Tag you have decided to use in the Tag Filter of the configuration for the Open Tickets so that the relevant tickets will be redacted. 

File Extensions

You can specify that attachments with certain file extensions are either kept or removed. If no files are specified, all attachment files will be removed.

Select whether to Keep or Remove.

Then enter one or more file extensions for the files you want to Keep or Remove.

Comments to Redact

Select which ticket Comments you want to remove the attachments from. You can select one or more of:

• Customer Messages
• Agent Responses (Public Reply)
• Internal Notes

By default all Comments will be redacted.

Inline Images

You can select to redact inline images. These are images that have been pasted into comments (for example, a logo in a sign-off) and would not be files containing any information.

Add private comment

In the Open Tickets redaction task, you can configure this to also add a comment to the ticket with the names of the file that have been removed. 

To enable this, checkmark the option Add private comment. 

Enabling Open Tickets

To enable the Open Tickets task, click the enable selector.

Saving the Open Tickets

Click Save Changes.

Once the Open Tickets configuration is enabled and saved, the task for the attachment retention of Open Tickets runs every 3 minutes.

Configuring Closed Tickets

The configuration for Closed Tickets is different. Closed Tickets runs once every day and redacts the attachments of tickets that have a status of "Closed".

Closed Tickets applies a Retention Period policy to the attachments. Using the number of days specified in the Retention Period, the app wakes up each day, goes back that number of days and removes attachments from tickets closed on that day plus tickets closed up to 5 days earlier.

Retention Period

You can set the Retention Period according to your own requirements.

The default for the Retention Period is tickets Closed less than 30 days ago and the app adds an additional 5 days to this. Using this default, attachments are retained in tickets that have a status of "Closed" that were closed 35 days before.

You can change the number of days for the Retention Period.

You can also set the Retention Period to be based on when the closed tickets were Created. and set the number of days (in the example below, days is set as 30). When selected as Created, attachments are retained in closed tickets that in this example, were created 30 to 35 days before.

When displaying the Configuration for Closed Tickets, this shows as a note the date that would be applied when the task runs "today".

• When the Retention Period is set as Closed, this displays the note as "Note: Today removing attachments in tickets closed between yyyy-mm-dd and yyyy-mm-dd."
• When the Retention Period is set as Created, this displays the note as "Note: Today removing attachments in closed tickets created between yyyy-mm-dd and yyyy-mm-dd."

Before saving the configuration, you can display a list in Zendesk of these closed tickets that will be redacted "today" by clicking View in Zendesk. This can help you decide how many days you want to select for your own requirements for the Retention Period.

Ticket Tags

For Closed tickets, you can add Tags to include or exclude tickets from redaction.

Select whether to Include or Exclude.

Then enter one or more Tags to Include or Exclude from redaction.

File Extensions, Comments to Redact and Inline Images in Closed Tickets

File Extensions, Comments to Redact and Inline Images are optional and are used in the same way as for the Open Tickets configuration. Refer above to File Extensions, Comments to Redact and Inline Images.

Enabling Closed Tickets

To enable the Closed Tickets task, click the enable selector.

Saving the Closed Tickets

Click Save Changes.

Once the Closed Tickets configuration is enabled and saved, the task for the attachment retention of Closed/Archived tickets runs every day.

Configuring the Redaction Task

The Redaction Task is a task that is run manually to remove attachments, in bulk. This is useful to reduce the storage space of your historical, archived tickets. You specify the status of the tickets and the start and end creation date of the tickets.

For example, you can specify the status as "Closed" and select the Date Range as the dates since you started using Zendesk Support with an end date of, for example, 31 days ago to remove the attachments from your archive of tickets.

This task is available with a once-off subscription, which lasts for 30 days, and this gives you credits where the redaction of one ticket is one credit. When purchasing the credits, you can select from 50,000, 100,000 or 300,000 tickets. You run the Redaction Task manually for each of the settings you want and you can run it as many times as needed for your requirements. A count displays with the number of tickets that have already processed and, you can purchase additional credits if you need to redact additional tickets. Refer to Subscribing to Auto Remove Attachments, Managing your Billing.

Once you have run the bulk redaction across your archive of tickets, the Open Tickets and Closed Tickets tasks will then automatically and continuously redact tickets according to your requirements.

Ticket Status

In the Redaction Task configuration, select one or more Ticket Status for the tickets on which you want to run the task.

Date Range

Select the Date Range as the start and end dates of either:

• The date the tickets were Created
  or
• The date the tickets were Last Updated

For example, you can select the date since you started using Zendesk Support, or you could select the past one year.

When you have selected the Date Range, an estimate is displayed of the number of tickets that will be redacted. This is an estimate only as it may depend on any other settings you select.   

Before running the task, you can display a list in Zendesk of the tickets that have been selected by clicking View in Zendesk.

Ticket Tags, Comments to Redact, File Extensions and Inline Images in the Redaction Task

Ticket Tags is optional and is used in the same way as for the Closed Tickets configurations. Refer above to Ticket Tags.

Comments to Redact is optional and is used in the same way as for the Open Tickets configuration. It is set by default so all Comments will be redacted. Refer above to Comments to Redact.

File Extensions and Inline Images are optional and are used in the same way as for the Open Tickets configuration. Refer above to File Extensions and Inline Images.

When selecting File Extensions, due to a limitation in the Zendesk API, an estimate cannot be given for the number of tickets that will be redacted for specific file types in attachments.  

Running the Redaction Task

To run the Redaction Task.

1. Select Redaction Task from the Auto Remove Attachments side panel.
2. Check the settings are correct for the Redaction Task you want to run.
3. Click Start Task.
   
   
4. When the task has run you are sent an email with a list of the tickets that have been redacted.
   
   

The email will report on any tickets redacted with errors. These are errors returned by the Zendesk API while redacting. One common reason for an error is when Auto Remove Attachments redacts a ticket with an attachment that was merged into another ticket. If you already redacted one of these tickets, the other one will still show as having an attachment in the search, although no attachment is present and the Zendesk API throws an error.

Re-running the Redaction Task

The Redaction Task shows a count of the tickets that have been redacted so far.

The count that shows as the count towards the credits is the number of tickets redacted, not the number of attachments.

This is a count of the tickets redacted by the task(s) that you have run. If this is showing remaining tickets to be redacted, and you still have credits left on your account, you can run additional tasks, for example, for a larger period of time.

You can click the View in Zendesk link to see the tickets, for example, to check the date range you need to run the Redaction Task for.

Change the settings in the Redaction Task to cover different scenarios and re-run it.

You can run the Redaction Task as many times as required to redact the complete archive of your tickets.