Here is the isssue:
I manage various websites.
These websites use Sendgrid to route form submissions to various email addresses in a Microsoft Exchange Server.
Sendgrid itself only routes emails if the "Sender" is from a recognized/validated domain. Assuming my domain is "@mycompany.com", all form submissions from all sites are sent with the "Sender" header equal to "[email protected]".
To partially circumvent this issue, the actual email address of the person filling the form (for example, [email protected]) is sent in the "Reply-To" header.
At the other end, these emails (the ones generated from the form submissions), are received by different accounts in the Microsoft Exchange server (each form in each site is associated with a different email address in MS-Exchange).
In many cases, these Microsoft Exchange accounts have "automatic replies" put in place for all incoming mail, so people filling the form can, for example, receive a "thank you for contacting us" email.
As far as I can tell, email client software (MS Outlook included) only recognizes the "Sender" header information for purposes of "automatic reply" (the "Reply-To" header is considered a security risk as it is hidden from the user and can be misused by third parties).
As a consequence, all "automatic replies" are routed back to the generic "[email protected]" account instead of the people who actually filled the form and gave their email addresses (in the "Reply-To" field).
Question:
Do you know of any way to circumvent this issue and have the "automatic replies" set in a way that the actual people filling the forms get the reply?
I tried looking in Sendgrid for any settings that would allow those form submissions (and only the form submissions) be routed, even if the email address in "Sender" is not from a verified domain.
I also tried to see if the "automatic reply" could be customized so it looks at the "Reply-To" header and not at the "Sender" header.
Exchange Server rules can act on reply-to field. I think that the issue preventing auto-reply from Exchange Server to personal email (@gmail.com etc) is organization-wide remote domain settings in Exchange Server. Can you pls check Exchange Management Shell cmdlet: Get-RemoteDomain
You may check further entries as Get-RemoteDomain -Identity Contoso | Format-List
The main fields to check are : AllowedOOfType AutoForwardEnabled, AutoReplyEnabled fields.
If there are no specific entries for personal email domain, then the settings in "*" domain is effective for remote domain settings and it should be checked.
If possible,setting the reply-to field as [email protected] which has the same domain with [email protected] to see if Exchange Server takes care of the reply-to field may be helpful.