Rick said:
I have a user who receives "forwarded" e-mail from another one of his
addresses. When he hits "reply," the To: address shows the address it was
forwarded from. He wants to be able to respond to the e-mail originator but
can't with current settings.
If we changed the "forwarded" e-mail address to an alias to his primary
account, would it still go to the orginal address it was sent to or would it
go to the originator of the e-mail itself?
A typical "forwarding service" will replace the headers with its own.
That means any replies will go back to the forwarding service. That's
what happens when you use a simplistic or basic forwarding service.
Some forwarding services never touch or add to the headers (so they hide
that the message was forwarded) but this violates RFC standards and
often results in those servers getting blacklisted as an open relay.
The problem is back in the forwarding service that is modifying the From
or Reply-To headers when it forwards a copy of a received e-mail. There
might be something configurable in the user's account at that forwarding
service. Hard to be specific when the details are vague.
Of the forwarding services that I've trialed, they don't touch the From
and Reply-To headers but might modified other headers along with
appending their own Received headers (to note the "hop" of that e-mail
through their domain). Some that operate as aliasing services, like
Sneakemail, SpamMotel, and SpamEx, will modify the From header to point
back to the user's account at that service. This is to ensure that any
replies to an aliased e-mail also go back through the aliasing service.
Otherwise, the user's reply would go through their own ISP's SMTP server
and reveal some info about that user that was otherwise trying to hide
behind an alias. While aliasing services do forwarding, they are more
protective of the user than just a simply forwarding service (where
replies do not go back through them but instead use a different path
through the user's own SMTP mail host).
http://www.sneakemail.com/info.pl/1218581831?sel=faq&sid=#how_reply
http://www.spammotel.com/spammotel/faq.html, "Replying" section
Most of these aliasing services not only strip out the original headers
(from the user's own SMTP mail host that was used to send the reply back
through the aliasing server) but some also interrogate the Subject and
body to strip out any strings that might reveal the user's true e-mail
address. Some don't.
So if the user is using a simple forwarding service, yep, that's how it
behaves when they reply unless the forwarding service does NOT touch the
From and Reply-To headers; however, even in that case, any replies will
reveal the user when they use their own SMTP mail host to send the reply
directly back to the sender. If there are no configuration options in
the account the user has with the unidentified forwarding service,
they're screwed because that is how that service functions. Sounds like
this "user" needs to find a better forwarding service.
Nothing is actually described as to WHAT is doing the forwarding.
