1. Administration Guide
  2. Using Reply To as an Alternative to Wildcard Approved Senders

Using Reply To as an Alternative to Wildcard Approved Senders

There are several business processes within Oracle Transportation and Global Trade Management that vary Email From addresses to help communications. For example:

  • Tenders: When a shipment is tendered, emails to service providers use the LOGISTICS involved party on the shipment as a from address. This allows the service provider to respond directly to the planner when accepting the offer.

  • Domain Based Senders: Via Domain Settings, each security domain can be assigned a distinct From Address Contact ID. Email sent out by users in these domains use the from address on the Contact rather than the property-based common from address.

Depending on your implementation, it might be straightforward to add all LOGISTICS or domain-based mail senders as Approved Senders, or use a few common mail domains as Wildcard Approved Senders. In an environment with planners across multiple email domains, however, this can be difficult.

An option is to map some or all of these From addresses to the reply-to address of the email, and use a single, property-based address as the from address. The Mail Delivery service, along with secure mail technologies such as SPF, DKIM and MARC, check only the from address and its mail domain. This protects mailboxes and recipients from malicious mail senders. The reply-to address, however, isn'tvalidated.

While using reply-to in place of a from address avoids Approved Sender and mail domain security requirements, it does have some disadvantages:

  • Most mail browsers display, sort and base rules on the From address. Recipients with folder or spam rules can't build them up based on the reply-to address. All email from the system will be viewed as coming from a single from address.

  • When opening up an email whose planner is a reply-to address, a service provider recipient will not see that planner as the from address. The planner is included as a Reply To field in the standard mail content, along with an HTML link to reply to that contact, and the browser Reply To will respond to the planner. But the addressing on the mail header can be misleading.

  • Standard stylesheets provided by Oracle have been updated to include the Reply To field in the body of the email. Any custom stylesheets made for email may or may not include this field, depending on how they were developed.

To use the reply-to functionality, the following properties are available:
  • glog.mail.useReplyTo.default=[true|false]
  • glog.mail.useReplyTo.All=[true|false]
  • glog.mail.useReplyTo.<Use Case>=[true|false]
where <Use Case> is one of: Diagnostics, Integration, Fax, MailValidation, NotificationContact, NotificationDomain, NotificationInvolvedParty, Report, TenderLogistics or TrailerBuildLogistics. The All property enables reply-to mapping for all emails. The <Use Case> property allows reply-to mapping to be enabled for one specific use case where they may be many from email address. For example:

  • To use reply-to address for all emails:

    glog.mail.useReplyTo.All=true

  • To use reply-to address for only Tender and Trailer Build communications:

    glog.mail.useReplyTo.TenderLogistics=true

    glog.mail.useReplyTo.TrailerBuildLogistics=true

When using reply-to addresses, custom mail stylesheets may opt to include the Reply To address in the mail body. A new XML element:
<ReplyTo>
    <FirstName/>
    <LastName/>
    <Email/>
</ReplyTo>
Is provided at the root of the DOM.