When you are making changes to the "New Ticket Auto-response" email template click on the third last icon in the toolbar called "link" and choose to insert a link called "End User Ticket Link".This should insert %{recipient.ticket_link} , which might actually save as %%7Brecipient.ticket_link%7D in the source, however, that doesn't really matter. Using the editor to insert the link seems to work best.