Has anyone else experienced this? For some of our programs, out of office/automatic replies are sending to the From Address and not the Reply To address. Is this common - and is this as expected?
New Idea
Soft bounce replies do not return to the Reply To address
+5I'd be curious to know if this is expected behavior as well
+1I had the same problem recently, can this be fixed?
I’m experiencing the same behavior, can anyone on the Gainsight team confirm this is expected and suggest any workarounds?
Hi All,
This is controlled by the email client and we may have little control over it. I would however work with the engineering to determine if we can influence it in any way.
+1We had this issue as well and my VP of CS received over 150 soft bounce replies to her inbox despite not being the reply-to email address. The support team confirmed this is expected behavior. Please look into a solution for this!
+1We had set up a different reply-to e-mail for the main purpose of avoiding spam (out of office, automatic replies). Because of the soft-bounce limitation, we ended up with 1k extra tickets in our system.
It would be fantastic if this could be considered!
+2These soft bounces are creating unwanted tickets in our support system too because the Reply-To address is not honored. A fix would be appreciated.
We have noticed this too - having sent out a large email run around the Easter period, my CSMs were inundated with out of office replies.
+1We recently experience this seemingly for the first time. We have a “From” generic address on purpose to avoid spamming our CSMs inbox. So this wasn’t a good experience for them to get all these bounce/out of office emails just because they were set as the reply-to.
+12Just happened to us, too. Please fix this!
+6This is 100% a normal behavior. Unfortunate, but expected when dealing with email systems.
Our workaround is to create a pooled email sender profile (close to the preferred sender’s name) for those mass-sends, but otherwise we just say “please filter by subject line and delete your inbox spam.”
See the response from ChatGPT below on the why:
Bounces and Out-of-Office (OOO) emails go to the sender's email address (From address) instead of the Reply-To address because:
SMTP Protocol Behavior:
When an email is sent, the envelope sender (Return-Path) is used for delivery errors and bounces, not the Reply-To address.
Mail servers return non-delivery reports (NDRs) to the Return-Path (which is typically the From address).
Reply-To is for Human Replies:
The Reply-To field is only used when a recipient manually replies to the email.
Automated responses like bounces and OOO messages follow SMTP rules and use the Return-Path.
Security & Anti-Spam Measures:
Allowing bounces to go to Reply-To could be abused for spam and phishing.
Servers ensure undeliverable messages return to the actual sender (Return-Path), not a potentially spoofed Reply-To.
"All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections." – Arthur C. Aufderheide
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