Not a bug xF2 and Amazon SES/Contact Us

[Bread]

Affected version

xF 2.0.9

Maybe, I'm just crazy but wasn't this fixed in xF 1.4?

I was messing with one of my xF2 boards and enabled "Sender info in from header on contact emails". This does not work on any of my boards, including a new install. Amazon SES sends back error code 554 about the sender not being verified.

@Mike https://xenforo.com/community/threa...t-form-cannot-be-delivered.78395/#post-796467

 

[DragonByte Tech]

It's worth bearing in mind that XF2 is a brand new product created from scratch, so issues fixed or persisting in XF1 may or may not exist in XF2

Besides, I don't believe this is a bug. If you observe the description of the setting:

[...] Enabling this may help with situations where replying to a contact message does not go to the correct address, but it may not be compatible with all SMTP servers.

(Emphasis mine.)

I'm going to assume the reason you are reporting this is that you are using a 3rd party email client that does not correctly handle the Reply-To email header, in the unique scenario that is Amazon SES + XF2.

I encountered this issue when using Airmail for Mac. These are the (replaced) headers that end up in the resulting email:

From: Belazor <example@domain.com>
Reply-To: Belazor <other@domain.com>
To: example@domain.com

Airmail would interpret these headers as needing to reply to example@domain.com and not other@domain.com as you might expect.
This is a bug in their email client, which I reported 3 months ago, and to my knowledge it has not been fixed yet, although I obviously had to stop using their client.

In short: If you're finding that, with "Sender info in from header on contact emails" turned on, your client is trying to reply to the wrong email, please make sure you are using the official mail clients (Mail.app on iOS / macOS, or Mail in Windows), or a trusted web client (Gmail, Outlook) then try again.

If that is not your issue and you simply want it to look pretty in your mail client, then unfortunately that is not going to be possible with Amazon SES.


Fillip

 

[Bread]

It's worth bearing in mind that XF2 is a brand new product created from scratch, so issues fixed or persisting in XF1 may or may not exist in XF2

Besides, I don't believe this is a bug. If you observe the description of the setting:

(Emphasis mine.)

I'm going to assume the reason you are reporting this is that you are using a 3rd party email client that does not correctly handle the Reply-To email header, in the unique scenario that is Amazon SES + XF2.

I encountered this issue when using Airmail for Mac. These are the (replaced) headers that end up in the resulting email:

From: Belazor <example@domain.com>
Reply-To: Belazor <other@domain.com>
To: example@domain.com

Airmail would interpret these headers as needing to reply to example@domain.com and not other@domain.com as you might expect.
This is a bug in their email client, which I reported 3 months ago, and to my knowledge it has not been fixed yet, although I obviously had to stop using their client.

In short: If you're finding that, with "Sender info in from header on contact emails" turned on, your client is trying to reply to the wrong email, please make sure you are using the official mail clients (Mail.app on iOS / macOS, or Mail in Windows), or a trusted web client (Gmail, Outlook) then try again.

If that is not your issue and you simply want it to look pretty in your mail client, then unfortunately that is not going to be possible with Amazon SES.


Fillip

With the option enabled while using Amazon SES SMTP, no Contact Us emails go out. This is because Amazon SES will not allow an email to go out as a nonverified sender (in this case, the person sending the Contact Us message). This was fixed in older xF versions as far as I can tell. I understand xF2 is a newer product, hence the bug report.

Maybe @Chris D can weigh in when he is not busy.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

With the option enabled while using Amazon SES SMTP, no Contact Us emails go out. This is because Amazon SES will not allow an email to go out as a nonverified sender (in this case, the person sending the Contact Us message).

Yes, I am aware, because DBTech also uses Amazon SES.

I am saying the description of the setting says that it may not work with every email server, so the fact that it doesn't work with every email server isn't going to be considered a bug.

Amazon SES is overzealous with their sender verification (as they should be), and as such we can't have every nice thing that more lax mail servers (e.g. mail servers where you only need a valid username / password) would allow us to have


Fillip

 

[ichpen]

With the option enabled while using Amazon SES SMTP, no Contact Us emails go out. This is because Amazon SES will not allow an email to go out as a nonverified sender (in this case, the person sending the Contact Us message). This was fixed in older xF versions as far as I can tell. I understand xF2 is a newer product, hence the bug report.

Maybe @Chris D can weigh in when he is not busy.

I don't recall this ever being fixed in XF1.5 for SES. As an SES user I've always had the option unchecked.

 

[Chris D]

You do need to have the option unchecked if you're using Amazon SES. I'd say that most installations should just go with having it unchecked.

I'm not even confident that the original reason for having the option in the first place is all that prevalent anymore. The option is there for email clients which do not handle the Reply-To header properly. In all honesty, I'm not sure I've ever used an email client (certainly not in recent years) that doesn't handle it correctly.

So, keep it switched off. If there's a compelling reason to keep it enabled, you may not be able to use SES for email sending.