Auto Responses to Executives

[Jason_Saunders]

Forgive me if this is a basic question. We recently launched a campaign where the email was sent on behalf of one of our executives. Their email address was in the reply-to and from fields. The executive later commented that they received a significant amount of out-of-office and address invalid messages. We have sent out many emails before on behalf of executives and this is the first time we have had this compliment. Has anyone else faced this? The article below states "Automatic replies, such as out-of-office notifications will be sent to the From address, not the Reply-To."  Is the correct course of action simply to put a different email address in the from field?

Different Email Addresses in the From and Reply-To... - Marketing Nation (marketo.com) 

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Putting a different From: address will stem most of the tide, yes. There may will be the occasional ill-behaved mail app that send to the Reply-To, but you’re 99.9% safe.

Interestingly, in the closest we have to an official RFC — though it never got out of Proposed Standard status — the recipient should be the envelope sender (i.e. MAIL FROM, not From nor Reply-To). But mail server vendors just decided to ignore that years ago.

[Amy_Goldfine]

Personally I never use a real person's email as the sender. If it's supposed to come from a person, I create an alias for them that I (or the email marketing team) receives. Then I escalate any real responses to the "sender." 

[Chris_Willis1]

+1 this response.

To get replies to the "Person" in the email, you should use the reply address with the Executive's email and use a valid signed email for the "from" sending address (to filter out those pesky auto-replies).  

[SanfordWhiteman]

To be clear, neither the From nor Reply-To are the "sender." That's the Sender header (if it exists, and you can't customize it in Marketo) or the MAIL FROM (which differs depending on your subscription type, but isn't the same as either header).

[SanfordWhiteman]

Anyway, human replies (as in clicking the Reply button) go to the Reply-To. Automated replies go either to the MAIL FROM - in which case you won't receive them - or the From.

[Jason_Saunders]

Thanks for the feedback. I 'll talked to the stakeholders about creating generic email accounts.