Preventing Delivery Status Notification Errors or email replys

Question

I have a web application (L/WAMP) It is hosted using the domain abc.com

Clients use the application from company 123.com which means their email address is something like [email protected] or [email protected].

The application will sometimes send out an email to [email protected] telling him that Bob has does something like approved or rejected his daily time entries. The system sends this email for Bob automatically. This email is sent to [email protected] from [email protected].

We're doing it that way to try to make sure the email ends up in the inbox instead of the spam filter.

So, my question is, is there a way to prevent the recipient from replying to the email (we provide a note with a link to mail the person direct using their 123.com email address) or from the recipient's email server sending back things like Out of the Office replies or Delivery Status Notifications?

Is there anything I can do in the address field or the email header that will tell the recipient's email server not try send anything back to [email protected]?

Any help would be great...

Answer 1

You could set the ReplyTo header to [email protected], so that the From address is still on the abc.com domain, but replies will be sent to [email protected].

Of course, this requires that the email client being used respects the ReplyTo header, but most do.

Answer 2

you can add the

Reply-to: [email protected]

header to make the reply to the mail you want, when the user clicks the reply button it will reply to that address, but I don't think this will prevent Delivery status notifications to be sent to [email protected].

Answer 3

Essentially there are three headers of relevance to you for this scenario.

The from header identifies who the email purports to come from, the reply-to header to which human initiated replies will be directed and, lastly, the return-path to which automated delivery status mails are sent.

Each of the three fields can be different.

Incidentally, if any of these headers use a domain which the sending smtp server IP address does not resolve to, and that domain is not included within your SPF records, then there is a greater chance that your email will end up in a spam folder.