idea Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails in ArcGIS Online Ideas

Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

dgugolj — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 17:22:39 GMT

In large institutions with significant ArcGIS Online user base, administration of accounts can be a daunting task. While SSO can solve some of the problems with provisioning accounts, providing Tier 1 support and communicating with the users in a consistent manner remains a challenge. To aid with this, we have created knowledge base support articles and various other content that 2000+ users in our organization can refer to for help, or be directed appropriately for personalized assistance.

Automated emails from AGOL often undermine these processes, as they are not consistent or customizable. I hereby propose that Esri should consider reviewing how these emails are configured, or even better, allow further customization by the AGOL organization administrators.

Please consider the following examples of the current automated emails:

EXAMPLE 1. INVITATION TO JOIN AN ARCGIS ONLINE ORGANIZATION
(Email received by the new user)

<Logged in Administrator / Inviter Name> has invited you to join an ArcGIS Online Organization, <Organization Name>

Please click this link to finish setting up your account and establish your password to join the organization, <Organization Name>:
https://www.arcgis.com/home/newuser.html?invitation=A5b31c91c15d4058a28099d738237d

This link will expire in 14 day(s).

Note that your account has already been created for you with the username, <Username>

If you have difficulty signing in, please contact <Logged in Administrator / Inviter Name> (<Logged in Administrator / Inviter Email>). Be sure to include a description of the problem, the error message, and a screenshot.

For your reference, you can access the home page of the organization here:
https:// <Organization Name>.maps.arcgis.com

Experience what's possible with ArcGIS Online. For free hands-on lessons and other resources, visit Learn ArcGIS.

This is an automated email. Please do not reply.

EXAMPLE 2. PASSWORD RESET AUTOREPLY
(Email received by the user after requesting a password reset)

Hello <Name of AGOL User>,

You recently requested support concerning your ArcGIS password. Click the link below to create a new password. This link is valid for 60 minutes starting from when you requested assistance.

https://www.arcgis.com/sharing/rest/oauth2/reset?id=mQl8l11AZqR3rRTc

You will first be prompted to answer your security question. You will then be able to create and confirm your new password. If you have any problems or questions, please contact your administrator(s), <Admin Contact 1 Name> (<Admin Contact 1 Email>) or <Admin Contact 2 Name> (<Admin Contact 2 Email>) . If you did not request this change, or if it was unintentional, you can disregard this message. Your password will remain unchanged.

Thanks,

The ArcGIS Accounts Team

This is an automated email. Please do not reply.

In the first example, the Logged in Administrator / Inviter is the administrator performing the addition of a new user account. This is similar to other administrative functionality, such as enabling Add-on licenses, or enabling Esri access. By default, the user receives an email that said administrator has made a change to their account, and to contact them directly for assistance.

However, in the second example, the user is directed to contact the listed "Administrative Contacts" which may or may not be the same as Logged in Administrator.

So, what's the issue, you ask?

Based on the current configuration, users in our organization are seeking us (admins) out via email or phone for assistance with account, licensing, generic GIS questions, etc. instead of following the established workflows (such as submitting a ticket to IT support) or utilizing the myriad of self-help articles that we've created which answer a lot of the trivial account and licensing related questions. Receiving these emails with contradictory information further confuses the end users.

A potential workaround to this would be to use a generic (e.g., group, shared) AGOL account as the Administrative Contact, and potentially parsing the submitted inquires from users into proper IT Support tickets, or redirecting them (via auto-reply) to proper workflows and knowledge base articles. However, this would also require our team of admins to share a generic login to AGOL to perform administrative actions (so that the email - see Example 1 - would specify the Administrative Contact information). As we all should know by now, use of generic/shared accounts is strongly discouraged both by Esri and your IT security teams.

Potential Solutions

Ideally, the email communications from the system would be fully customizable. Being able to provide links to the relevant online content, contact information besides email (phone numbers, social media links, support centre chat) would be extremely helpful.

Failing that, it would be great to be able to provide Administrative Contact(s) that are not necessarily AGOL accounts - like a generic IT email that is already set up with auto-responses or the ability to parse out the submitted content into a support ticket.

At minimum, the emails should be configured so that the "please contact your administrator(s)" line always provides the Administrative Contact information, instead of the Logged in Administrator.

Thank you for your consideration. If others have come up with solutions or workarounds to this, please share.

Davor

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

AdamMcLane — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 20:09:31 GMT

Yes!

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

maryam — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:08:41 GMT

Yes!

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

RandyKreuziger1 — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 16:34:51 GMT

@dgugolj Totally agree. I was just researching this today and came across similar requests from 3 years ago. The advice from ESRI at that time was to submit it as a Idea 😞

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

AmyWork3 — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 23:54:32 GMT

Fully support customizable emails. This would help alleviate some of the emails that come in from students on password resets, as well as license updates.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

SamPalmer — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 02:14:43 GMT

This would be great! What I would like is to just customize a response that would put a link to our AGOL FAQs for our org. 99% of the time it's just a password reset request, but we use SSO, so it's not a password reset they need, the user just needs to know how to log in. @PeterKnoop had a great workaround, which was to create an admin user with a gmail account, then set custom reply filters on the gmail account. If "password" is in the body of the email have gmail reply back to the user with specific instructions for login. I haven't actually tried this but I've been meaning to give it a shot.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

Olwyn_Bruce — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 19:28:45 GMT

This would be VERY helpful.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

ReinaCMurray — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 13:38:00 GMT

I didn't see this post until after I posted mine, for the same request -- yours is much more detailed! YES to all of this; the majority of our automatic emails are for password requests, but we use enterprise logins, so it's just about us, like @SamPalmer described, referring users to the screenshots and FAQs we've prepared showing them how to log in properly. I'll have to see if we can use @PeterKnoop's workaround, just having this ability be part of AGOL would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of people.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

PatIampietro — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 15:22:39 GMT

Yes, fully customizable emails and the ability to create and send emails to selected members or groups would be an improvement.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

MiriamOlivares1 — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 21:45:21 GMT

Additional comments Re: example #2:
A top reason to receive an email asking for Esri troubleshooting support is the AGOL users thinking they forgot their username and password. While the Esri login versus org login is confusing (maybe leave both login options expanded?), the least users and admins deserve (please!) is message customization, so admins direct users with org-centric instructions instead of advice to email the AGOL admin. Thank you for considering.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

PatIampietro — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 22:19:25 GMT

+1 to Miriam's and OP's point! The time and effort required of admins to talk users down from misleading information they receive via AGOL system messages and emails (regarding sign-in issues, license expiry, etc.) is significant and unfortunate.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

AmyWork3 — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 05:50:35 GMT

We recently setup a notebook to auto reallocate credits to university users who have suddenly used all their credits. I would like to customize the message that goes out to the user and admins stating that "their account should be reallocated with credits within 15 minutes". However at this time, I'm unable to customize that message so I'm still receiving a number of emails from patrons asking to have additional credits. If I could customize the automatic message from Esri, the end-user would know right away that they will have additional credits in 15 minutes. This will reduce their stress they encounter when working on an assignment or project.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

RandyKreuziger1 — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:12:58 GMT

ESRI, is this still not possible? I apologize if I missed this being implemented, but requests for this go back to 2018 if not earlier. The only moments from ESRI in the community forums suggest up voting the ideas requests. Obviously, that's not working.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

lwrogers — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:55:49 GMT

I get dozens of emails a week because some student tried to log into arcgis.com with their SSO student ID and password rather than logging directly into our org's AGOL site. They are then directed to reset their password which sends them an email to contact the site administrator (me). If ESRI can direct people to contact me then why the heck don't they just direct them to log into their org's AGOL site!? So dumb.

Customizing emails would be a great help here but really, the way it is now is just counter-productive and broken in my opinion.

Re: Customizing ArcGIS Online Administrative and System Emails

Peter_Burnett — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:46:10 GMT

While my organisation is not the size of the original posters it is still always inaccurate and misleading for us to advertise to users to contact the administrative contact. Some means of customisation to point to self help or simply to the IT helpdesk ticketing system would be a huge improvement.