Creating an email referral form

Who should the sender be?

[tys0n28]

I am in the process of adding a referral form to my site and wanted to get opinions on the best way to do it. Specifically around the From: header.

The general idea is that a user would enter a list of comma-separated email addresses, and this form would email a message to these folks inviting them to join our site. Pretty standard stuff.

My dilemma is who should this email come from? Should it come from the user's email address OR our site's email address? I think the marketing message is more powerful if it comes from the user himself, but I'm afraid that the Spam filters will treat it like spam since the message wasn't sent from the proper email server.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Tyson

[piatkow]

All the major webmail providers will definitely treat it as spam if you use the user's address.

[tys0n28]

I know of one site, let's call it XYZ.com, that sends emails from [e-mail], but in my email client (Outlook) it says From: John Doe via XYZ.com ([e-mail]). Then when I click Reply, the message is sent to [e-mail].

That seems like it might be a good solution. Any idea on how that can be setup?

Tyson

[phranque]

i'm not familiar with outlook behavior, but it is probably using the Reply-To: header.
there is also a Sender: header as well as the From: header.

[physics]

One problem with having the From: be the user is spam backscatter. Spammer puts random emails in the From: area and uses your recommendation form (injecting some insidious links) to send spam to a bunch of unsuspecting victims. At least if the 'official' email for your company is in the From: and Reply-to: fields it will be easier to catch and address this sort of spam than if the from/reply to is a field that can be entered by the user.

[piatkow]

I had a similar problem a few years ago. I had to do some mailouts for a local non profit organisation that I am involved with from my own PC. Reply had to be to a Hotmail address.

Setting "from" @hotmail.com resulted in no delivery to Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL as the source was outside of Hotmail. (Gmail didn't exist then)

Setting from donotreply @ my isp subdomain worked fine but some email clients appeared to ignore the reply address and and when checking the "donotreply" address for bounces I also found replies.

Whichever route you take there will probably be a significant failure rate.

My own mailout problems were resolved when the organisation purchased a domain name and ran the emails through the hosting provider rather than Hotmail.

[tys0n28]

Thanks for the tips. I decided to go with the Reply-To method and have figured out how to adjust these headers in Java. I am setting the From address to be my site's email address, but the From Name to be that person's name, and the Reply-To address and Name to be that person's email address.

I think I will also include that person's email in the body of the message, just in case we have the same problem piatkow describes.

physics, that is a concern as well. Perhaps I will add a variable to the database that shows how often a particular user has sent out these emails. If it proves to be a problem, I can make it so that only users with 3 months time on the site can use this feature.

Thanks again for all the comments on this.

Tyson