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I'm not sure how better to phrase the question, so I'll try to be clearer in the question. We've got Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010 all being run.

In a SharePoint application we run, emails are sent from an address of [email protected]. Based on which of several sites it came from, the code would alias the email address in the format PROJECT NUMBER - PROJECT NAME. This way, even though the emails came from the same address, users could set rules in Outlook to filter specific project reminders into specific folders.

However, an update to the email filter a couple months ago blocked off all outgoing email from this address, because it was not a recognized email address from Active Directory. We fixed this by creating an AD entity named "SharePoint" that used that email address, which satisfied the filter.

This has had the unfortunate side effect that all of our internal users have "SharePoint" as their contact. As such, while my code definitively and repeatedly asserts that the email is coming from PROJECT NUMBER - PROJECT NAME, and while our clients and other external emails will see it coming from the same, all of our internal users get it from SharePoint regardless of the source. And they're not very happy about that.

Is there a setting or other method that can be used to override Outlook's overriding the specified name for the email address? Is it specific to any version of Outlook? Or is there something that can be done in Exchange Server or Active Directory to amend this issue?

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  • I reckon there's no changing the email filter as it seems that's the one causing the real problem
    – Ivo Flipse
    May 5, 2011 at 20:32
  • @Ivo Even if we could change the email filter, I'd still really like to know if it's possible to change what Outlook displays, just so that I can guarantee that people's rules will work.
    – Grace Note ♦
    May 5, 2011 at 20:33
  • wouldn't it be possible to set up multiple entries in the AD for each coded PROJECT NUMBER - PROJECT NAME and then modify the code to pick the appropriate one for the location at run time?
    – Xantec
    May 5, 2011 at 20:59
  • @Xantec That doesn't sound like it scales very well. We have thousands of projects. Maybe not active projects, but then maintaining the culling of closed accounts sounds even more nightmarish in scalability.
    – Grace Note ♦
    May 5, 2011 at 21:07
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    Is there a reason you are not sending PROJECT NUMBER - PROJECT NAME in the subject of the email and basing the Outlook rules on the content of the Subject field instead of who the email is From?
    – Kerry
    May 28, 2011 at 4:47

1 Answer 1

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I think abusing the senders' address aliases to aid filtering is futile. You never know what a new release of an email client will do to canonicalize sender naming.

Suggestion:

Prepend or suffix the original subject or body text with something like [[[project number - project name]]] so that it is impossible or at least unlikely that this meta-information will be part of the original message.

That is what most helpdesk ticketing solutions do to be able to correlate emails.

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