Safe Sender Domain Functionality not working correctly with SendGrid

[azturner]

Description

Reported on behalf of Grace Community Church

When creating a new communication with a From address that does not have a safe sender domain, Rock is correctly setting the From address to the organization's email address, but when it is setting the Reply To value with the value from the From Address, that value is not working correctly with SendGrid and recipients cannot then reply to the original sender.

If user actually enters the same email address in the Reply To field, that value will work correctly with SendGrid and the recipient will be able to reply to the email

In debugging code, when user does not enter a value in Reply To, Rock is sending a value like this to SendGrid in the ReplyTo field:
"David Turner" <[email protected]>

When user actually enters a value in the Reply To field (like "[email protected]") in the communication entry, the ReplyTo value send to SendGrid looks like this:
[email protected],"David Turner" <[email protected]>

Even though Rock is still adding the extra address with the formatted name (which it doesn't seem like it should), that still works and recipient can reply to the email correctly.

It appears then that SendGrid does not like a ReplyTo value to have the formatted name with the email address.

Actual Behavior

When recipients try to Reply to an email send from address that is not in Safe Sender domain, the organization's email is used.

Expected Behavior

When recipients try to Reply to an email sent from address that is not in Safe Sender domain, they should still be able to reply to the sender's email address

Steps to Reproduce

• Configure SendGrid Email Transport
• Add your organization's domain as a safe sender domain
• Make sure your organization email (global attribute) has same domain as safe sender.
• Create new communication and set from email address to have domain that is not same as safe sender
• Send the email
• Reply to the email, notice that email you will be sending to is the organization email and not the From email address

(could not reproduce in sandbox because no email transport, but was able to reproduce in two different production Rock instances using SendGrid).

Issue Confirmation

• Perform a search on the Github Issues to see if your bug or enhancement is already reported.
• Reproduced the problem on a fresh install or on the demo site.

Rock Version

v16.6

Client Culture Setting

en-US

[JimMichael]

I can confirm this behavior with our SendGrid in Rock 16.6. Sending a new communication from a non-Safe-Sender email via the simple editor to an non-safe-sender recipient, I can see in the recipient's header that the Reply-To is nonexistent:

Replies to that will go back to the org address.

But if I send the exact same email and now enter the sender's non-safe-sender email in the Reply-To field of the new communication, it adds the reply-to in the recipient's header as expected and replies go back to the reply-to address.

[ThomasStephens17]

This happens with the Group Leader Toolbox as well. Most churches want to use the Simple mode, where there is no Reply To text box.

[kfrazier13]

We use SendGrid and are on 16.5 and have run into the same issue. A group leader sent a communication from the Group Leader Toolbox on November 25 and it had the "reply-to" email but when she sent one on December 27, there was no "reply-to" email.

[nlabarbera]

Hey there 👋 - Thanks so much for jumping in here. We've noticed similar reports from a few other churches, and we're actively digging into this to get it resolved.

From our initial review, it looks like the issue might be on SendGrid's side, but we're diving deeper to pinpoint what changed and explore a potential workaround in the meantime. We'll keep you updated as we make progress!

[karenn-ccbc]

We too are experiencing the problem. I am finding a lot of replies in our organization inbox. I created a Leader Toolbox default template and used Lava to try to set the reply to email address of the current person, but this does not appear to be working either. We are currently on 16.6 and use Sendgrid.

[nlabarbera]

A quick update here - After looking into this, we found that the behavior was due to a change on SendGrid’s side in how they handle Reply-To addresses. While this didn’t originate from Rock, we’ve made an adjustment to ensure replies continue working as expected.

[karenn-ccbc]

A quick update here - After looking into this, we found that the behavior was due to a change on SendGrid’s side in how they handle Reply-To addresses. While this didn’t originate from Rock, we’ve made an adjustment to ensure replies continue working as expected.

Thank you, I noticed it before and then forgot about it due to holidays, etc. I just feel there is/will be a lack of confidence in the leader toolbox because of this issue and I hate to see that for our staff and volunteers. Hope we can resolve it soon.