Reply-to ignored in emails sent on behalf of user on other domains

Question

We offer a function to send an article by email to a friend's personal email. We would like the friend to be able to continue the conversation simply by replying to the email.

To avoid yahoo, hotmail, etc. to flag the emails as spam due to dmarc policies violation, we follow this recommeandation.

So our header looks like this:

From: "John Doe via the Example Website" <service@website.example.com>
Reply-To: "John Doe" <john@firstmailboxprovider.com>
To: "Bob Smith" <bob@secondmailboxprovider.com>
Subject: "An article I thought you would find interesting"

Unfortunately, many (lots) of email clients simply skip the Reply-to parameter. So, many people are responding to us instead of their friend.

What is the recommendation?

Notes:

Respect of Reply-to header seems to be client dependent (not destination domain dependent).
Many solutions are unfortunately no more bulletproof in 2016: Potential issues using member's “from” address and the “sender” header

these days there probably is no good way to do this - except maybe to act as a go-between and route between the two parties, i.e. they reply to johndoe@website.example.com and you then send it to bobsmith from there — tofutim, May 25 '16 at 04:08
@tofutim craigslist-style http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/email-relay ? — Toto, May 25 '16 at 04:10
do you have a list of which email clients are skipping the reply-to? i would be quite interested in that matrix — tofutim, May 25 '16 at 04:12
i thought this was interesting - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2421234/gmail-appearing-to-ignore-reply-to — tofutim, May 25 '16 at 04:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · 2016-05-25T14:44:57.187

1

Can't you include the friend's email in body?
That way the user can click on it to reply.

Perhaps send to "both" so they can reply-to-all?

edited May 25 '16 at 14:44

answered May 25 '16 at 14:16

That was our fix, but you would be amazed to see the number of people who simply click "reply" without reading the clear, short "instructions" (one sentence). We have a lot of traffic, so even a few 1/1000 mistakes make a lot of messages. :( So we are looking for an alternative. – Toto May 25 '16 at 14:31
You can do it as a mailto: command which will open their mail client.`The text of your link` this way it will full out the subject for you. – Henry May 26 '16 at 20:55
@henry problems is people just hit reply. – May 30 '16 at 23:51
@DaniSpringer.com If they hit reply - they will be replying to the person that sent the email, using mailto: makes the customer send the email in their mail client instead of his server. – Henry May 31 '16 at 18:57

Reply-to ignored in emails sent on behalf of user on other domains

1 Answers1