Header problems with e-mail messages.... - UPDATE

[David M. Rosenberg]

Edwin Mukusha <emukusha at nebraska.edu> wrote (in part):
> Has anyone ever been able to specify a reply-to address on an
> e-mail emanating from the SAP system (4.6C)?
>
> What irks me about this whole issue is that I am trying to
> something that is standard functionality within e-mail systems
> worldwide.
 
Edwin,
 
Many years ago, the MIT campus gave up on trying to use SAP Office
to send E-Mail external to the SAP system. Instead, we use a local
function module (named "Z_SENDMAIL") which makes a direct call to
the Unix "sendmail" command. This gives us a number of benefits:
1. Complete (and independent) control over all the headers
   (including From, To, Cc, Bcc, Reply-To, etc.)
2. The ability to control the RFC 821 "MAIL FROM" command so we
   can capture and act on non-delivery notifications
3. The ability to insert our own HTML markup and put in headers
   so that messages will be interpreted properly (this can be used
   to instruct mail clients that might normally have displayed
   text in a proportional font to use a fixed-pitch font).
4. The ability to turn on a "logging" option for certain groups
   of messages (used for debugging - not for normal processing)
5. In non-production environments, the ability to intercept
   certain groups of messages and either:
   a. discard them
   b. re-direct them to other recipients (e.g. a test coordinator
      or a developer)
   c. write them to an SAP Spool file
   d. Write them to a Unix file
 
Item 5 was implemented after a few incidents where our production
system was copied to a test system and in the course of testing,
E-Mail was sent to real end-users who mistook it for messages from
the production system. This feature is described on the web page at
<http://web.mit.edu/fss/zsendmail/email_zsendmail.html>.
 
Most of this was originaslly implemented under 3.0F. It has been
refined slightly over time and is our standard way of sending mail
external to SAP from our 4.6C system.
 
/David Rosenberg           rosenberg at mit.edu