How do I prevent auto-replys (out-of-office/ DNR/etc) to my automated emails? (laravel)

Question

I have a bulk emailer that sends marketing updates to a list of users. We want legitimate responses from our users to come back to our customer service email address, but for reasons irrelevant to the problem, I can't filter them out on the receiving end.

I'm wondering if there's a header, or something I can add that prevents auto-responses from being returned.

Answer 1

After more digging for an answer that seems like a pretty common problem than I was prepared for, I stumbled on this question about how to suppress auto-replys in C# that took me down a Microsoft wormhole into MSDN docs, mentioning the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header - more on this headers options

It's also mentioned, but not explained in the symphony Docs

What I found was yes, there is a header that can be attached, and from what I can tell, it has varying levels of success with being honored by different email servers. Microsoft/Exchange seems to have the most documentation around it, so I suspect they support it pretty widely, but I don't have experience with actually using this yet - will update after implementation.

I'm formatting this for Laravel, but the header should be widely applicable to any language/framework.

Here's how to add to an email builder in laravel:

/**
 * Build the message.
 *
 * @return $this
 */
public function build()
{
    $this->view('emails.orders.shipped');
 
    $this->withSwiftMessage(function ($message) {
        $message->getHeaders()->addTextHeader(
            'X-Auto-Response-Suppress', 'OOF, DR, RN, NRN, AutoReply'
        );
    });
 
    return $this;
}

Here are the keys and their meaning:

Key	Meaning
DR	Suppress delivery reports from transport.
NDR	Suppress non-delivery reports from transport.
RN	Suppress read notifications from receiving client.
NRN	Suppress non-read notifications from receiving client.
OOF	Suppress Out of Office (OOF) notifications.
AutoReply	Suppress auto-reply messages other than OOF notifications.
None	Don't suppress anything
All	Suppress everything