FROM Addresses in Quickbase
In the next major update to Quickbase one of the things I would like to address is the issue of how we set the FROM address for emails sent by Quickbase.
First some background. All email messages contain 3 email addresses, the TO address, the FROM address and the REPLY-TO address. The REPLY-TO is optional and most email clients will just use the FROM for replying if the REPLY-TO is absent. A second bit of background is that an email address may contain text that is purely informational such as the full name of the user to whom the email is being sent.
Today Quickbase sends the following emails:
- Notifications
- View Subscriptions
- Reminders
- Email-a-record
- Email-a-view
In the first two cases we give you some control over the FROM address. In the other cases we don’t.
This issue is whether the FROM address should be the email address of the actual sender or an email address from [email protected] that might look like this:
fred_smith @ example.com (via quickbase) <[email protected]>
The reason for using the latter is that, more and more, email servers are rejecting as SPAM any incoming mail message that has a FROM address in the same email domain as what is normally sent out from that server.
So here is what I am proposing to do: Email messages sent out from Quickbase will always come from [email protected]. However, we will give you, the user, control over what appears in the informational part of the FROM address. More importantly we will give you control over the REPLY-TO address.
But the biggest change is that we will remove these options from individual notifications, subscriptions, etc. and, instead, provide these options at the application level or even possibly at the Workgroup level. My feeling is that this is a fairly technical configuration option that someone subscribing to a view isn’t necessarily going to have the expertise to understand. Much more likely that the application/workgroup administrator will be able to make these decisions and that, in fact, this configuration should apply to all emails sent from that application/workgroup.
Comments?
Joe Rice
Quickbase Lead Designer | www.quickbase.com | Intuit – Waltham Office