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You are here: Home>> Tutorial>>E-mail Headers
Some mailing programs use a customer ID to enable bounces and replies to be
handled efficiently by the sending application. Example below:
Return-Path: <12345.987654321@email.company.com>
Received: from rly-xg02.mx.aol.com (rly-xg02.mail.aol.com
[172.20.115.199]) by air-xg02.mail.aol.com (v95.12) with ESMTP id
MAILINXG22-4503f3be83836d; Thu, 14 Aug 2003 15:51:56 -0400
Received: from mta1.espmailer.net (mta1.espmailer.net [100.200.50.1]) by
rly-xg02.mx.aol.com (v95.1) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINXG24-4503f3be83836d; Thu,
14 Aug 2003 15:51:21 -0400
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 15:54:53 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <91435-12209-86938625-2@espmailer.net>
From: "Company.com" <12345.987654321@company.com>
To: AOLMEMBER@AOL.COM
Subject: Fall Travel Sale! The Best Deals on Airfare, Hotels, & More
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
**********************************************
When an AOL member opens this e-mail, they will see the following in their mailbox:
From: 12345.987654321@company.com
Subject: Fall Travel Sale! The Best Deals on Airfare, Hotels, & More
Date/Time: August 14, 3:54pm
Many e-mail applications will show the "pretty" address in quotes as
the sender (in this case Company.com). But AOL software (including 9.0) will
instead show the address in <> brackets. (Note: Netscape 7.0 and AOL's new
AOL Communicator e-mail applications do show the pretty address.)
In addition, many times the customer ID is longer than the AOL Client "From" field allows, so the AOL member will see a truncated portion of the address. For example:
From: 12345.98
This situation may make the member believe this e-mail is spam.
***********************************************
There is a header "trick" that can be used to make things work better
for AOL members but will not affect the rest of your internet recipients.
Change the "From" line and add a "Reply-To" header as
follows:
Reply-To: <12345.987654321@company.com>
From: "Company.com" <12345.987654321@company.com>
1. The member will now see Company.com as the sender.
2. The bounce address ("Return-Path") has not changed.
3. In addition, if they reply to the e-mail, the reply will go back to the
<12345.987654321@company.com> address.
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