This Dastardly Email From Issue

[carlg]

Hi,

I am trying to send an email using email_send2() and the .From header component to specify the sender's email for easy replies. No matter what I do the email always uses the email address from my profile I have setup as the From email address, even if I don't specify the profile in the function.

dim message as p
dim vResult as l
message.from="[email protected]"
message.to="[email protected]"
message.subject = "Test"
message.message = "Test"
vResult=email_send2(message,"",.F.,.F.,.F.)

When I run the above the from address is always "[email protected]" which is the email address in my profile. I want the from to be something I am pulling from my form but even when I specify a different value directly, as above, it does not use that as the From. Does anyone know why this might be the case?

Thanks,
Carl

[Steve Workings]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

Looks pretty good Carl. Couple things to try:

1. Try adding an alias and see if that helps:
message.from_alias = "Batman"

2. Simplify your function call to just this:
vResult = email_send2(message)

I don't know that either will make a difference, but a comparison with some of mine suggests these experiments

[Steve Wood]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

Your script looks correct. The function will use the Default email profile unless you specify a different one. But I confirmed (just now) that the function does work in including using the values for .from and .from_alias. It works for .from even if you do not specify a .from_alias.

Not that it matters for the function, but I would not use "message" as the property array name, use something like "pm" instead.

[carlg]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

Steve,

Thanks so much for the reply and your suggestions. I tried implementing both:

dim message as p
dim vResult as l
message.from="[email protected]"
message.from_alias = "Batman"
message.to="[email protected]"
message.subject = "Test"
message.message = "Test"
vResult=email_send2(message)

The alias did come through as Batman but the email address still showed as "[email protected]":

Batman <[email protected]>

I went into the WAS Email Settings for my one email profile, which is setup for [email protected]. I am using gmail for the POP and SMTP in this profile. I first tried changing the Your Name and Your Email Address fields (in the Account tab) to the from information I'm trying to implement. That didn't help as the email still came through as from [email protected]. Then I updated the Username and Password fields in that same tab to the information for my personal gmail account, for which I'm testing the From field. When I did that, the email did come through with the from email set to [email protected]. The Alias still did work as well as it said "Batman".

So despite the fact that I am not using the profile in the email_send2 function, the profile is clearly being used anyway and it is ignoring the .From header component that I set and using the profile's information instead. Any ideas? My understanding from the documentation is that the email_send2 function uses built-in Alpha email features. Perhaps I have something configured in the profile wrong so that Alpha always uses it for the email_send2 function? Is there any way to setup a profile that doesn't automatically use your username as the From email address?

Thanks,
Carl

[GGandhi]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

So despite the fact that I am not using the profile in the email_send2 function, the profile is clearly being used

email send2 uses the profile, it is optional to mention which one to use, if you did not mention then it uses the last used profile.
the script looks good it should have your name as alias.
if you want no profile then you have to send with no profile option
email_send_noprofile()

[carlg]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

The function will use the Default email profile unless you specify a different one.

OK Steve, so I have to setup a different email profile for this? How do I setup an email profile so that it uses the .From value in the email_send2() function?

Thanks so much for your help!

Carl

[Tim Sutherland]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

Carl,

We recently ran into a similar issue and found the culprit to be Gmail.

Ours always worked fine and we were having issues with our domains email server where some of our emails weren't being sent properly. We temporarily changed the SMTP settings to our Gmail account until our hosting company got the problem resolved.

As long as we were using Gmails SMTP server to send the emails, the from address would not pull from the logged in user.

We came to the conclusion that Gmail blocks this behavior.

I suspect if you use the SMTP server for obitium.com it will work correctly.

Hope this helps...

Tim

[Steve Wood]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

I bet the difference is you are using gmail as your email processor. I can try that here....

EDIT: Opps, cross post with Tim

[carlg]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

We have a Google Apps for Business account with users that we use for other purposes so I was hopeful to use it as our mail server for our web app through Alpha. I just spoke with support at Google Enterprise and they explained that in order to do this what Alpha Software would need to do is allow me to modify the "Return Path" as opposed to the "From" value of the email. As an example, here is an excerpt of the original email that was sent through the Alpha using the code I referenced in my above posts for this thread:

Return-Path: <[email protected]>
From: Batman <[email protected]>
X-Google-Original-From: Batman <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Test
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 17:29:34 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Alpha Five Version 12.0 Build 1755-4215
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Test

You can see that my code has set the X-Google-Original-From: Batman <[email protected]> correctly to [email protected] but not the From value just above it, which apparently Google does block from being modified. But the value for Return-Path: <[email protected]> remains [email protected] and this is all I would need to change. If I could set this value in the email_send2() function then when we receive the email from the contact form we can simply reply to it and it will be sent to the email address the user provides, which is what I'm after. In looking at the documentation for email_send2() I do see:

.Headers
Optional. Default = "". If the user wants to supply additional Email headers per RFC822, they can set them in the Headers property.

Would this be something I could use to set the "Return-Path"? Does anyone know the correct syntax for this? Or if I am on the wrong track here?

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

I think there is a p.Msg.reply-to = or maybe p.Msg.reply_to= (not documented anywhere I can find)

You can use that to return to a different address.

[Fulltimer]

Re: This Dastardly Email From Issue

I think there is a p.Msg.reply-to = or maybe p.Msg.reply_to= (not documented anywhere I can find)

You can use that to return to a different address.

Has anyone found a definitive answer to the original post in this thread? I have been brothered by this same issue for years. It would really be appreciated if you could advance some working solutions to this problem.