Generated Emails (CDO or Persits) Ignore Reply-To Settings

Is anyone else having the problem that, whether using CDO or Persits to general emails froma Web page, setting the Reply-To header no longer has any effect?

I used this to correctly route responses to emails that were generated via a Web page, but recently all emails sent via my pages suddenly started ignoring my code's attempts to set Reply-To fields. Some of my users are rather non-technical, and don't notice when their reply-email's "to" field isn't what it should be...

I've tested this on my DiscountASP.net web site using both CDO and Persits.ASPEmail; both have the same effect, making me suspect that it's a server/SMTP-level issue.

Any thoughts? Anyone else?

 

If by "your target mail server" you mean the one I'm using to send the email, that would be "localhost" -- i.e., the DiscountASP.NET server on which my site is running. If that server suddenly started stripping out Reply-To headers on outgoing emails, I'd like to know why.

If by "your target mail server" you mean the one to which the emails are being sent, that seems oddly fortuitious, since these site-generated emails are sent to various different email servers (Earthlink, AOL, Yahoo!, etc. -- some directly and some though site-local forwarding addresses), and all of these are suddenly no longer receiving Reply-To headers in the emails. So it seems unlikely that they all started stripping out Reply-To headers at the same time.

I've done multiple test scripts from my DiscountASP.NET Web site, as well, and this effect is consistant. My email-generating code (ASP/VBScript) has not changed in many months, but this just started happening within the last month. It is extremely frustrating, and makes my Web site's email-generation next-to-useless, since most of the people I have my site generating emails to are very non-technical, and do not have the presence of mind to lookat the email address they're responding to before sending replies (which means their replies are going nowhere, and the original senders are feeling ignored).

Any ideas?

 

Arg. I found a silly bug in my own code that was disrupting the setting of the ReplyTo property. Duh. It's working now.

Not sure why it was working before and then stopped, but...

Thanks, Bruce!

 

What is your reply-email's 'to' field supposed to be?? Just Curious ..

i dont use Reply to and when I reply to a web based generated email, it has the correct email address to reply to ..

Bahamas Security - BahamasSecurity.com
Bahamas Real Estate - KnowlesRealty.com

 

Basically, what I have are forms that allow Web site visitors to send email to specific roles within the organization. They can enter their own names and email addresses, and the ASP page will determine the appropriate recipient email addresses for use in sending the email. (Nothing unusual, there.)

When configuring the generated email message, I use the target role's stored receipient address for the "to" address, but I use a standard email address like [email protected]for the "from" address and not the email address provided by the sender. My primary reason for this is that some email servers and other services will notice that the email bears a sender email address domain that does not match the domain/IP from which the email was sent, and might interpret that as an indicator that the email was spoofed, such as for spamming or other nefarious purposes. If they receive and notice a significant number of such emails over time, they might decide that I looktoo spammish, and do something to block my site's emails.

As an example, my place of work did use the user-supplied sender email address as their Web site's send-this-to-a-friend generated email's "from" address for quite some time and ran into various problems and complaints along these lines because of it, and only finally corrected it when they heard that AOL was going to blacklist them as a spoofer/spammer. My site's email volume is much smaller than theirs, but the principal is the same, and I'd rather be safe.

So my Web site generates emails with a hardcoded local-domain "from" address, and uses the email "Reply-To" field to ensure that recipients who choose to reply to their generated emails (and are generally not aware enough to notice the email address to which they are replying) will end up sending their replies to the right place.