Contact form emails; from, reply-to, …?

Question

We are developing a contact form for a SaaS application; each instance of our application will have a contact form to contact the instance owner.

Our first version sends email from a generic SaaS email address (i.e. contact@saas.com) to the owner of the instance (i.e. user@example.com).

This works, but of course if user@example.com replies to the email, the answer gets sent to contact@saas.com . I'm wondering what's the best practice here:

1. Setting the from: message to the email address filled out in the contact form would enable replies to be sent easily to the person who sent the contact form- but then, we cannot tell people to add contact@saas.com to their whitelist to avoid spam filtering
2. Setting the reply-to header seems better, but I'm wary that some clients will misinterpret reply-to
3. Including an explanatory text in the message seems inconvenient, but workable
4. Allowing instance owners to read contact forms through their admin panel seems too much work (but completely spamfilter-proof, albeit inconvenient)

I'm leaning towards 2. Thoughts?

Alex

Answer 1

I'd definitely go for option 2 . From-Header / Envelope-From should make it clear that the message originated at your service (and allow proper bounce handling etc) . I'm not aware of any current mail clients that cannot handle reply-to header correctly. to be on the safe side you could mix in option 3 and clearly state that the message was sent from address sender@example.net via your webform.

Answer 2

Proper whitelists should work if you put the real sender in Sender: and/or the envelope sender; but then again, in an ideal world there would be no Microsoft.