Logo Questions Linux Laravel Mysql Ubuntu Git Menu
 

Best practices: Sending email on behalf of users

The company I work for provides testing services for the healthcare industry. As part of our services, we need to send email to our clients' employees. Typically, these are temp, part-time, or contract employees, and so have private email addresses (eg Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo!, etc).

Up to now, we've been sending from an internal address, but this means that replies come back to us when employees aren't paying attention or don't know to send queries to our clients. I'd like to change this, so that the person who requests that the email is sent is the person that is replied to.

We've used reply-to: in the past, but it seemed to cause additional mail to be trapped by spam filters.

I've been reading about sender: and on-behalf-of: headers, and was wondering what the current best-practice was for sending email in a scenario where we need to send email such that the reply goes to a domain we don't control.

like image 823
Ben Doom Avatar asked May 06 '10 15:05

Ben Doom


People also ask

How do you say sending an email on behalf of someone?

CC: CC means 'Carbon Copy. ' If there is someone who should be privy to the information that you're sending, but doesn't necessarily need to respond, this is where you'll put the addresses of those people. If you're sending this message on behalf of someone else, it's polite to send a copy to that person.

Is it legal to send email on behalf of someone else?

As long as you have permission from the person on whose behalf you are sending emails, it is fine.

How do you send an email on behalf of a group?

Select the group that you want to allow users to send on behalf of. Select Settings > Edit manage delegates. In the Add a delegate section, enter the email address of the user that you would like to have Send as access. Select Permission Type as Send on behalf from the drop-down.


1 Answers

The on-behalf-of header is the best way to do that, but you are also going to get trapped by spam filters. The best to mitigate or lessen the likelihood that you will end up in the spam filter is to implement all the industry standards around verifying your domain and mail server. As indicated in this article:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html

However that is very tough to do, because you need to stay on top of SPAM standards, and abide by CAN-SPAM laws and everything else. The better bet is to use a on-demand cloud based SMTP server like this one:

https://www.postmarkapp.com

Use a company that is a domain expert in the area of sending email and has gone through all the leg work to get the highest deliverability rate. And will stay on top of the standards for you, and monitor black lists for problems.

like image 161
Nick Berardi Avatar answered Oct 15 '22 11:10

Nick Berardi