Hey @Zac Herman 
Shauna here from Support!
There’s no way around this; when you add the ‘email’ as a ‘cc’ - it adds it as an additional participant so it’s expected that it shows as ‘lead’.
This would be a feature request to have the ability to add a ‘cc’ in that doesn’t show as a lead. I'll definitely let the team know that this is something you would like to see in the future though
I know it may seem self explanatory, but as it's great for the Product team to be able to see why introducing particular features is so important, I'd love to know a little more on your use case here 
Hey @Shauna,
Happy to elaborate, but the issue I am having is not with the email that is cc’d.
In this scenario, Johnny emailed me (Zac) directly. In my response to Johnny, I cc’d our support email which routes straight to our intercom inbox. The problem is that I (Zac) am now being added as a lead even though I have an account as a teammate in our workspace under the email I sent the message from. The system correctly added the customer as a lead, but we need to not list teammates of our intercom workspace as “leads” for conversations they are looping support into.
Some background on the use case. We use intercom strictly for customer support. Customers will usually reach out to us via 3 methods.
- Intercom chat on our support site
- Email our support email address directly
- Email one of our teammates directly
Whenever one our teammates gets emailed directly, we want them to loop the support team in for visibility. This allows our leadership team to get a better understanding of what the most common support issues are so we can directly address them in the product in attempts at creating a better experience for our customers.
Part of the issue is that intercom treats everything as a “lead” which is more for a sales workflow than a customer support workflow. I understand that the best implementation of intercom would be to embed it directly into our product which will allow us to validate the customer reaching out to support has a valid account. That is ultimately our goal, but we are likely a few months out from that. Regardless, even when we do implement intercom into our product, customers will continue to reach out to us directly via email from time to time. With that being the case, we need to figure out a way to appropriately handle these this scenario.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you for the help!
Hey @Shauna,
Happy to elaborate, but the issue I am having is not with the email that is cc’d.
In this scenario, Johnny emailed me (Zac) directly. In my response to Johnny, I cc’d our support email which routes straight to our intercom inbox. The problem is that I (Zac) am now being added as a lead even though I have an account as a teammate in our workspace under the email I sent the message from. The system correctly added the customer as a lead, but we need to not list teammates of our intercom workspace as “leads” for conversations they are looping support into.
Some background on the use case. We use intercom strictly for customer support. Customers will usually reach out to us via 3 methods.
- Intercom chat on our support site
- Email our support email address directly
- Email one of our teammates directly
Whenever one our teammates gets emailed directly, we want them to loop the support team in for visibility. This allows our leadership team to get a better understanding of what the most common support issues are so we can directly address them in the product in attempts at creating a better experience for our customers.
Part of the issue is that intercom treats everything as a “lead” which is more for a sales workflow than a customer support workflow. I understand that the best implementation of intercom would be to embed it directly into our product which will allow us to validate the customer reaching out to support has a valid account. That is ultimately our goal, but we are likely a few months out from that. Regardless, even when we do implement intercom into our product, customers will continue to reach out to us directly via email from time to time. With that being the case, we need to figure out a way to appropriately handle these this scenario.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you for the help!
We're facing the same issue. It's very difficult to tell customers to stop sending emails directly to individuals sometimes, especially the founder.
Let's say Des is pretty popular, and a lot of high-value clients end up reaching him at des@intercom.com. Without this problem being fixed, Des would have to:
1. Forward to the team inbox.
2. Then get back into Intercom.
3. Find that conversation that was added.
4. Reply back from Intercom.
This seems a bit needlessly complicated, especially when Intercom already knows Des' email, can identify incoming email as Des', and that he's a teammate. Hence, don't add him as a lead.
Not treating teammates as a lead will save us a lot of time. Hoping this will get fixed soon.
