Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Rabiah Khairy — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 17:03:07 GMT

Hmm well i guess its always a tradeoff for security and usability. this feature is required by our client. It was a pain to implement it, especially the path dir has changed since the upgrade. If it hadnt been for our other project teams who went thru <18.4 version, doubt i would have gotten this figured out. Thanks for the enlightenment! Appian should look into this gap, and i'll let my client know of the potential security issue

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:56:51 GMT

In a former project we actually used the Custom Sender "override" functionality that you've found (it was a pain to set up in the first place but easy to use after that), and at some point I tried to change it over to the new OOB custom sender functionality and it never quite worked right. We ended up needing to remain on the legacy implementation for that, though luckily the functionality never actually stopped working. Appian insisted that the new OOB functionality could not be changed to match the legacy workaround because of "spoofing issues", IIRC.

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Rabiah Khairy — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:48:41 GMT

hi Mike! i managed to solve my problem. Apparently this capability was removed from 18.4 onwards. take a look at this documentation in 17.3 https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/17.3/Configuring_Custom_Email_Senders.html . 18.4 onwards was when they introduced Custom Email Sender https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/18.4/Configuring_Custom_Email_Senders.html

I basically followed the steps in 17.3 closely (Adding a Custom From Address section onwards) and managed to get the below output. Im gussing Appian might have missed this feature as part of upgrading. I have raised a ticket nonetheless as it seems funny to be using an outdated way of doing things. thanks for your reponse!

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 13:52:25 GMT

I honestly don't recall whether it's custom.properties or a different server-side config file, though yes it's something like that.

There might not be a solution like what you were hoping for. But if you play around with the values of the sender display name / sender email address, you might be able to figure out a configuration that's at least less annoying. If that's still unacceptable, please open a support case with Appian with specific details of your use case, and expectations versus actual runtime results.

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Rabiah Khairy — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 01:34:05 GMT

hi! the config file, do u mean the custom-properpties file? in addition to this, you are saying that as of now theres no solution to my question?

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Rabiah Khairy — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 01:30:58 GMT

hello! thanks for the suggestion. i did, and i got this below

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 13:52:09 GMT

AFAIK, in addition to the "sender" email address you add, Appian still sets the "from" email address (as seen in the email headers) to the environment's "Admin" email address, i.e. the one set only in configuration files and not touchable at all from the "design" side. Then, different mail servers and/or clients will notice that the domain of the "sender" email doesn't match the domain the email actually originated from, and they take different actions designed to prevent spoofing / phishing attacks etc. In many cases that I've seen, Outlook will display the "sender" line as something like, "admin@yourEnvironment.com on behalf of donotreply@yourEnvironment.com". I've raised this issue with Appian before but they've told me there's nothing further they can do about it.

RE: Email Display Name not appearing on Outlook

Stefan Helzle — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 12:14:46 GMT

conf.mailhandler.ntf_sndr_name has nothing to do with the send email node.

Did you try toemailaddress("John Doe<johndoe@gmail.com>")?