blog/data/2012-07-03-fiksgatami-zimbra.txt

   1 Title: Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?
   2 Tags: english, nuug, fiksgatami
   3 Date: 2012-07-03 23:30
   4
   5 <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
   6 project (Norwegian version of
   7 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
   8 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
   9 a problem with the municipalities using
  10 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
  11 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
  12 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
  13 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
  14 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
  15 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
  16 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
  17 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
  18 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
  19 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
  20 the From: header.</p>
  21
  22 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
  23 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
  24 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
  25 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
  26 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
  27 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
  28 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
  29 behaviour.</p>
  30
  31 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
  32 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
  33 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
  34 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
  35 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
  36 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
  37 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>