Reply-to customer email broken

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Hello,

Our client's website has started to have issues with replying to customer order notifications. When a new notification arrives in the admin's inbox, they would normally hit "Reply", then continue with sending the message. Now when they do this, the customer's email address is not correctly inserted into the "To" field in any email app.

The address inserted into the "To" field is plain text, followed by the "From" name and address defined on the Main > Emails tab of the configuration section.

I have attached two screenshots of how the email addresses look in SparkMail for macOS when viewing the admin order notification and when replying to the customer.

Any idea on why this is happening?

Cheers,

Hi,

I don't see why the email of the customer would be removed from the to.
However, I would first try to look at the email server sending your reply to the customer.
So the next question is how did you configure SparkMail to send the emails ?
You must have configured an email server in its settings (either the one of your ISP, or your hosting, or a third party email service), and I think that it's this email server which removes the email of the customer from the to for some reason.

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.

The issue is affecting SparkMail for Mac and Outlook Express for Windows on two different ISPs, so I am assuming the issue has to be related to the server hosting the website. Would you know if a mailer change on the server could cause this issue?

Cheers,

Hi,

It could well be. In fact, even no change wouldn't meant it doesn't come from it.
It's possible that the email server is configured with some rules to handle emails based on whitelists/blacklists/etc downloaded from 3rd party services. For example, this one: mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
And thus, if something changed in that third party service, it could lead to your emails having problems without your server being changed in any way.
But you need to check the service your using to send the emails. You can see it in the settings of SparkMail and Outlook Express. It's not necessarily on your website hosting server. It could be an email server provided by your hosting, but which isn't managed by your own server (if you have your own server). Or it could be something totally different, like for example gmail if you're using a gmail address.