How to Set Up Automatic Replies on Emails from Process Model

Question

We use process models to send a number of emails to our users. The emails come from addresses like processXXXXX@appiancloud.com. When a user replies to those emails, the email goes into a black hole. We would like to set up an automatic reply back to the user letting them know they emailed an unattended mailbox. As an aside: we cannot change that sending email address as our internal email controls thinks it is a spoofed email and blocks it as it comes into our environment. 
 Has anyone done this before? If so, how?

Mike Schmitt · Answer

One option might be to work with Cloud support and set up a "custom sender" - that was the only way of having the sender's name and email address appear different, until the relatively recent changeover of the Send Email node to allow the new customizations in the "sender" info. The reason the old "custom sender" functionality works seems to be centered around how Appian sets the headers in the outbound email -- in the new, out-of-box functionality (as best i can remember), the environment's "admin" email is always listed as the "sender" parameter, which at least in my case was why it was being flagged as spam by some recipients. Our old-style custom sender setup never had this issue, as its headers are more consistent with how actual emails work. 
 I'd previously asked Appian Support to look into this, but they declined to change this behavior for some odd security reason - if i remember correctly, it's something focused on not wanting Appian to be able to effectively "spoof" emails from other individuals. So it's a bit of a catch-22 at this point. In the one project I attempted to use the new functionality in, I just ended up having to roll back to the old style since too many of their customers were reporting emails not coming through or getting flagged as spam.