I am on the board of a homeowner’s association. We have an email address under our own domain name for the board of directors. It is not a mailbox, it is just a distribution list forwarder. Homeowners can use this address to send email to all the board members. However, sometimes the board would like to send emails out to homeowners and have it come from the board, without it coming from any one individual board member.
Basically I want to know how to spoof this email address. I want it to look like it’s coming from the board, and have replies go to the board. Is there any way to do this in a conventional email client, or do I have to use something sketchy like spammers use? The closest thing I can find is to set a Reply To address but the From address is still me.
The From line in an e-mail is whatever you set it to be. The only reason your emails currently show as “From Cookingwithgas” (or whatever they say) is because, at some point in setting up your e-mail program (or setting up the previous program it imported its settings from), you told it to say that. Where exactly that setting will be will depend on what program you’re using, but it’ll be in there somewhere.
You may want to set “Reply-To”, but strictly speaking it is optional. If you don’t specify it, replies are supposed to go to the address in “From”. “From” should be the board address, and your own personal address should go into “Sender” if you are the one who sends the actual message.
ETA if you totally screw it up, you risk getting your emails eaten by all the spam filters
It’s not a spoof if he or she is on the board. The rule is that the “From” address should belong to you. A spoof would be if you sent a message and made it look as though it came from me. Don’t assume that urgent message from your buddy asking for money is real.
Even a legitimate mailing list with the headers all filled out with the proper addresses according to the standard? Seems like a overzealous spam filter.
Many email servers will reject mail when any of the headers don’t match - if sent-from and reply-to don’t match, it will get rejected. Or, if sent-from doesn’t match the domain that the email was actually set from (relaying).
I know, because I used to want ALL emails sent to specific clients to get replyed-to to a specific email address, regardless of what account it was sent from. I finally gave up, after fighting with perpetual bounces from specific servers.
Sorry, doesn’t seem overzealous at all, to me.
I want my spam filter to reject any message where the Sent-From doesn’t match the Reply-To.
And so do most people – that’s why spam filters are programmed that way. And that’s because spammers found this loophole in the standard, and are using it to pummel us with their garbage spam. Or fix the standard, so that this spam loophole is closed.
I’m not a spammer, so I don’t send out thousands of emails, but I can tell you that our technical support, and orders, and accounts people always send out mail from accounts, and orders, and support, not using their individual email addresses.
I can also tell you that many email clients use “from” and “reply-to” differently to each other, and set, or display or ignore one or the other. To give just one example, the gmail android client will silently swallow one of those values when forwarding mail.
Personally, I’ve never met a spam filter that compared the reply-to and from addresses, and I wouldn’t expect it, because it’s just too random on real mail. But that’s irrelevant: the OP asked how to make them the same, because he hadn’t figured out how to do so.
And that, as mentioned above, is entirely up to the email client software, and may not even be possible.
Who’s handling the email? I know you said it’s from your domain, but is the actual email handled my gmail or whoever is hosting your domain or do you have an in house server.
They can all set their own rules for how an alias works. With google, I believe there’s a way to send mail from an alias.
In any case, the easiest way might be to turn the forwarding address into an actual address. You can still set up filters to forward all the incoming mail to wherever it needs to go, but it would also be the simplest way to send email from that address without having to worry about making any changes to anything when you wanted to do it.
Sometimes the board makes decisions that affect individual homeowners. We want to notify an individual homeowner of a decision or reply to a inquiry by an individual homeowner, and present that email as coming from the board. My experience has been that if I personally send an email, even if the content of the email says it is from the board, that the homeowner responds to me as an individual and holds me individually responsible for a decision made by the entire board. Although we do not want to prevent people from communicating directly with an individual board member, our experience has shown that is it important to present the board as a united group.
I use Outlook as a desktop client. When you set up an email account, it authenticates your email address against your server. You can’t just specify an arbitrary From address. (You can specify an arbitrary From name, but not email address.)
In Outlook, you can set any sender you want for an email, and that acts as the Reply-To, but then the recipient sees “CookingWithGas <Cooking@Gas.com> on Behalf of Board <board@myhoa.com>”. I am not trying to hide the fact I’m on the board but I don’t want to be the sender of the email.
I want this email to be sent as though it were sent from the board account, which doesn’t actually exist.
We have a web site but it does not include email boxes (available at exorbitant extra charge). It does include four forwarders. There is also a web-based email capability, so I can use that to send emails as the board, but it does not allow you to select individual homeowners for the email; you must create a filter. I use the default “all users” filter all the time for announcements, but sending to individual homeowners is a ridiculous process.
I would think that I could send an email from any email I damn well please and my ISP’s SMTP server shouldn’t care, because it doesn’t know what my domains are to begin with. I just don’t know how to do it short of writing my own client to open a telnet session with the SMTP server.
Sometimes the board makes decisions that affect individual homeowners. We want to notify an individual homeowner of a decision or reply to a inquiry by an individual homeowner, and present that email as coming from the board. My experience has been that if I personally send an email, even if the content of the email says it is from the board, that the homeowner responds to me as an individual and holds me individually responsible for a decision made by the entire board. Although we do not want to prevent people from communicating directly with an individual board member, our experience has shown that is it important to present the board as a united group.
I use Outlook as a desktop client. When you set up an email account, it authenticates your email address against your server. You can’t just specify an arbitrary From address. (You can specify an arbitrary From name, but not email address.)
In Outlook, you can set any sender you want for an email, and that acts as the Reply-To, but then the recipient sees “CookingWithGas <Cooking@Gas.com> on Behalf of Board <board@myhoa.com>”. I am not trying to hide the fact I’m on the board but I don’t want to be the sender of the email.
I want this email to be sent as though it were sent from the board account, which doesn’t actually exist.
We have a web site but it does not include email boxes (available at exorbitant extra charge). It does include four forwarders. There is also a web-based email capability, so I can use that to send emails as the board, but it does not allow you to select individual homeowners for the email; you must create a filter. I use the default “all users” filter all the time for announcements, but sending to individual homeowners is a ridiculous process.
I would think that I could send an email from any email I damn well please and my ISP’s SMTP server shouldn’t care, because it doesn’t know what my domains are to begin with. I just don’t know how to do it short of writing my own client to open a telnet session with the SMTP server.
Yes, if you use Outlook, AFAIK it authenticates the FROM address. Is outlook what you want to use? If so, what are you authenticating against? Our Outlook users authenticate against gmail or exchange, and mostly only send “from” addresses on the same domain, so it’s just a matter of including permission for those users to send from those mail addresses.
On exchange, I can set up an external address at will, but I don’t remember if gmail will let you do that: they may want to verify that you own the external domain (by demonstrating your ownership of the DNS records), or they may simply want to verify that you own the email address (by sending you a confirmation email at the address)
Yes, if you use Outlook, AFAIK it authenticates the FROM address. Is outlook what you want to use? If so, what are you authenticating against? Our Outlook users authenticate against gmail or exchange, and mostly only send “from” addresses on the same domain, so it’s just a matter of including permission for those users to send from those mail addresses.
On exchange, I can set up an external address at will, but I don’t remember if gmail will let you do that: they may want to verify that you own the external domain (by demonstrating your ownership of the DNS records), or they may simply want to verify that you own the email address (by sending you a confirmation email at the address)
Your ISP cares because it is held responsible for the email it sends, so it only relays email for domains which it knows it is responsible for. If it allows the mail relay to be abused, it will end up on an email blacklist. This is why many ISPs have moved to not offering email hosting at all - they either resell gmail/hotmail/Outlook365 or just don’t do it at all.
When I hosted my own domain email via a residential ISP I had to pay for access to a trusted SMTP relay service to send mail out to the world.
And you can’t just try to send email directly - ISPs block or redirect SMTP traffic from residential IPs to their mail server, to prevent spambots getting their whole IP range blacklisted.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. I use Verizon Fios at home and Comcast at work, and freely send and receive emails under my own domain name, which is not hosted by Verizon. They are in no way responsible for the domain.
Right, but are you sending using their SMTP server? Just because you are connected to Verizon doesn’t mean you are using their SMTP server - in fact, you probably aren’t, because most email accounts specify the correct SMTP server to use for any messages originating from that account.
At this point we have to notice that, independently of the email message headers we have been discussing, if you use SMTP to send mail you also need to specify a return path, which I believe should be a mailbox belonging to the list administrator but I’m not certain what the rules are. Again, if the spam filtering doesn’t like it then the chances increase of your message getting bounced or disappearing.
Mailing lists still exist, so there must be a right way to do it.
I manage a mailing list, and we have endless issues. Some mail servers simply won’t handle messages from the list correctly, so we just tell those folks to subscribe with a different address.
