When forwarding an e-mail how to configure e-mail clients to put the address of the original e-mail sender (From:
) to the Reply-To:
(or different) header?
I am looking mainly for a solution for Thunderbird and possibly MS Outlook. Solutions for other e-mail clients would be welcome too. Unfortunately I did not find a solution for Thunderbird besides writing a new extension. Of course I am looking for an automated solution I know that the Reply-To:
header can be filled manually.
The story behind this need is below.
Situation
We are using a helpdesk system (OTRS) and there is a problem that sometimes customers send a request to a personal mailbox instead to the helpdesk. I am looking for a solution how to manually forward those e-mails to the helpdesk address from the personal mailboxes.
Standard solutions do not work
Unfortunately standard forward operation puts the address of the forwarding user to the From:
header. This is very uncomfortable because in OTRS the customer has to be changed manually and even then the reply puts the forwarder into To:
and the original customer only to Cc:
which is wrong.
E-mail clients usually allow redirect or bounce function which is similar to forward but the original sender is kept in the From:
header. Unfortunately our mail server does not allow sending e-mails as other users and it is very unlikely that this limitation will be removed.
Informing helpdesk about the original sender
Fortunately OTRS is customizable to a great extent. It can parse e-mail headers and according to them perform certain actions but there is no standard e-mail header which would keep the original sender and it seems that major e-mail clients do not use any non-standard one for this.
It seems very logical to put the original sender to the Reply-To:
header so this is the reason for the question at the beginning of my post.