Re: Issue with "reply to"

Anonymous · ‎04-21-2015

Hi Community,

I sent out an email from our CEO but I wanted the reply's (especially the out of offices) to be sent to a different email address. I set the reply to, to be our marketing email, and it worked for most of the emails, but the CEO still recieved several out of offices, why is this and how do I fix it?

Thanks!

SanfordWhiteman · ‎04-21-2015

@Kristen J There is no real-world standard for the Out of Office recipient -- some mailservers will send to the Reply-To, some to the From, and some to the envelope sender (which you won't see). This type of message hovers somewhere between a bounce and a reply, so semantically it can be difficult to determine the single "right" recipient to receive the knowledge that a message was received but will not be read immediately: is it the person who "owns" the original message who is the stakeholder, or is it the person who "owns" the (theoretical) replies to that message?

View solution in original post

Anonymous · ‎04-21-2015

The "out of office" replies fire automatically and are not truly a "reply". A reply is when someone physically clicks on the button to respond. Because you had the CEO's email in the From field, the autoresponders go to his or her address.

I had the same thing happen to me and I learned this the hard way. I would set up an email that looks like it would belong to the CEO but have it be a generic inbox.

Anonymous · ‎04-21-2015

Hi Kara - thanks for your help! But why did most of the out of offices go to the marketing inbox and only some went directly to the from address?

SanfordWhiteman · ‎04-21-2015

@Kristen J There is no real-world standard for the Out of Office recipient -- some mailservers will send to the Reply-To, some to the From, and some to the envelope sender (which you won't see). This type of message hovers somewhere between a bounce and a reply, so semantically it can be difficult to determine the single "right" recipient to receive the knowledge that a message was received but will not be read immediately: is it the person who "owns" the original message who is the stakeholder, or is it the person who "owns" the (theoretical) replies to that message?

Pierce_Ujjainw3 · ‎09-10-2015

Thanks Sanford, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Anonymous · ‎06-16-2015

Hey Kristen, I moved your question to a better location for more visibility.

Oz_Platero · ‎05-25-2016

Hello Kristen,

Unfortunately this is an equation with many variables. See these two articles that give an explanation of how this works in detail.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MtdgfARneAEJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/317842...

See the answer with 5 votes.

RFC 3834 - Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail

Thank you,

oz