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emailsendmailemail-headers
Muleskinner
Muleskinner

Reputation: 14468

Can we trust `reply-to` to be respected

Our webapp sends out mails on behalf of its users. The header fields are set as following:

HEADERFIELD  MAILADDRESS           NAME
------------------------------------------------
from:        [our mail address]    [users name]
reply-to:    [users mail address]  [users name]
sender:      [our mail address]    [name of app]

This is working well, but on a few occasions, when the recipient reply to the mail, the reply is coming back to us (our mail address).

This leads to my question: Does exist mail-clients who does not respect the reply-to field or do we have to look for an explanation elsewhere?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1383

Answers (1)

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189487

Upsettingly but unsurprisingly, Microsoft Outlook seems to completely ignore Reply-To:

So no, you cannot trust clients (or, you cannot trust Microsoft; story of our lives).

A common arrangement is to use a separate envelope sender (which would display on the client's side as Return-Path: but this is not a header you can meaningfully set from the sender's side as the client's MTA will overwrite it) and simply use From: to set the address where you want the replies. You can also use Sender: to put in a "this is where this message is really from", although Outlook and I believe Gmail will display it as something slightly annoying like "From Name of App on behalf of Users Name".

Upvotes: 3

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