I have a bulk emailer that sends marketing updates to a list of users. We want legitimate responses from our users to come back to our customer service email address, but for reasons irrelevant to the problem, I can't filter them out on the receiving end.
I'm wondering if there's a header, or something I can add that prevents auto-responses from being returned.
After more digging for an answer that seems like a pretty common problem than I was prepared for, I stumbled on this question about how to suppress auto-replys in C# that took me down a Microsoft wormhole into MSDN docs, mentioning the X-Auto-Response-Suppress
header - more on this headers options
It's also mentioned, but not explained in the symphony Docs
What I found was yes, there is a header that can be attached, and from what I can tell, it has varying levels of success with being honored by different email servers. Microsoft/Exchange seems to have the most documentation around it, so I suspect they support it pretty widely, but I don't have experience with actually using this yet - will update after implementation.
I'm formatting this for Laravel, but the header should be widely applicable to any language/framework.
Here's how to add to an email builder in laravel:
/**
* Build the message.
*
* @return $this
*/
public function build()
{
$this->view('emails.orders.shipped');
$this->withSwiftMessage(function ($message) {
$message->getHeaders()->addTextHeader(
'X-Auto-Response-Suppress', 'OOF, DR, RN, NRN, AutoReply'
);
});
return $this;
}
Here are the keys and their meaning:
Key | Meaning |
---|---|
DR | Suppress delivery reports from transport. |
NDR | Suppress non-delivery reports from transport. |
RN | Suppress read notifications from receiving client. |
NRN | Suppress non-read notifications from receiving client. |
OOF | Suppress Out of Office (OOF) notifications. |
AutoReply | Suppress auto-reply messages other than OOF notifications. |
None | Don't suppress anything |
All | Suppress everything |