Plus Addressing Improvement

Overview

Following on from the introduction of 'Plus Addressing' in our last release, we've made a further enhancement by adding an option to hide the work item IDs (e.g. '100123-T') used as plus addresses in the 'From' address of emails. This is a system-wide setting made in Builder.

When the new 'Hide Work Item Matching Data in Email Addresses' setting in the system settings section of Builder is enabled, work item IDs will NOT display as plus addresses in the 'From' address. Note that this option is set to off by default.

The impact of this is that if the setting is enabled, instead of seeing emails with

'[e-mail]' in the from field, it will instead show simply as

'[e-mail]'.

How it works - further details

When email is being sent out of Enate / received by recipient

When the new 'Hide Work Item Matching Data in Email Addresses' setting in Builder is enabled, a hidden 'Reply To' field will be added in the background to the email header for emails being sent out of enate, to allow the work item ID to be saved there rather than in the displayed From address. This means that it will no longer show in the 'From' address - not when the email is being composed in Enate, and not when the end recipient receives the email. It will show instead simply as e.g. '[e-mail]'

When recipient composes and sends a reply email

However, when the end recipient clicks reply/reply all to this email, the 'To' address field WILL get automatically populated with an email address AND the work item IDs used as plus addresses (i.e. the mail that the end user is composing will show the 'To' address as '[e-mail]'. This is because it's using the value in the hidden 'Reply To' field in the email header. This is in order to allow Enate to link this email to the correct work item.

External Email Client Software

There may be some risk that email client software does not handle the ‘Reply To’ field properly. The global email standard says this field should be supported by all email client rather than must be supported. Enate has tested this with Microsoft and Gsuite and both of these work as desired with a ‘Reply To’ header. Other email clients will also likely work as desired in the same way, but these have not been tested by Enate.

What is the operational impact if an end customer's email client doesn’t support the ‘Reply To’ field? The email client just ignores the 'Reply To' and sends the email reply to the From address (in this example '[e-mail]'. This in turn will mean that the Enate system will create a new piece of work rather than linking it into the existing thread. If this does occur, this new work item can simply be manually merged with the correct item.

Some spam email detector technology may increase the risk score for the email with ‘Reply To’ headers set like this because the 'Reply To' address is different to the 'From' address. This is one of many hundreds of factors considered in spam filtering. Customers can be asked to whitelist specific email addresses to mitigate such risks.