Exchange Online redirect needed to remove original addressee from the To, but not other addressees.

Question

Exchange Online redirect needed to remove original addressee from the To, but not other addressees.

Gerard Oneill 21

My configuration goal is to forward / redirect a message going to a mailbox to an external site (its an email capture setup).

I was using forwarding, which is straight forward but includes the original "To" address in the recipients, and the email capture thinks its part of the group. Reply-alls to the messages it sends doubles and then triples the number of active cases.

Then I found that "Redirect" seems to be a keyword that does EXACTLY what I want - it forwards the mail as if it was sent directly from the sender, without notifying the sender nor the "redirecting" email box. Except its not doing that; its behaving exactly like forwarding. If I can get this to work as advertised, that's all I need. My expectations are that the recipient doing the forwarding would be removed from the To list, so that the email capture site only sees the original sender and everyone else on the TO and CC and BCC recipent lists.

My second attempt was to modify the headers - Remove "To" and then redirect the message, which adds the "redirect" address as the recipient, and has no idea there was a forwarding address. It worked.. Except if there is more than one address specified by the To header. It removes all of the addresses specified in To, including the additional addresses sent with the original mail. But customers can frequently add coworkers or other parties, and the email capture does "reply" to all recipients, which is what we want. Just not the original forwarding / redirecting email.

So is there a way to

Get "Redirect" to work as advertised
Only Remove part of a header, perhaps via a substitute regex
Replace or delete a single recipient.
Some other cool and nifty way to forward without taking along the forwarding / redirecting address.

If it helps, it seems that the rules for Outlook Online have this distinction between forwarding and redirect. Unfortunately right now my case is a shared mailbox without the office365 license (for this account).

2 answers

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Answer 1

Victor Ivanidze 101

Try to use an Exchange online transport rule to redirect an email.

Gerard Oneill 21 Reputation points

2023-06-08T17:57:19.8433333+00:00

The above message describes my attempt at using these transport rules. There is no redirect using the per account forwarding. The "redirect" mentioned is one of those rules, not behaving with the distinction I've seen in microsoft help for Outlook 365 rules.
Victor Ivanidze 101 Reputation points

2023-06-09T09:55:35.89+00:00

Sorry I still don't understand why do you say the Redirect transport rule does not work as advertised. For me it just redirects, not forwards.
Gerard Oneill 21 Reputation points

2023-06-09T14:47:29.1566667+00:00

What is the difference you see? The way I was reading it, the final recipient should not know that it was forwarded, which means the forwarding accuont address should not be in the list of recipients. Otherwise, are there other headers that do get modified / removed between forwarding and redirecting? And just as relevant, is there are reason that Outlook's rules aren't reflected more generally in the Exchange Online transport rules? I don't see a way to "forward" in the rules (you can forward from the account's email box); there's a chnace that that "redirect" in the transport rules is being used as a synonym for "forward". And perhaps a way to "redirect" from both the transport rules and from the account's email box needs to be added.

So could you describe what you see as the difference (in the email) between forwarding and redirecting?

Answer 2

Dezhi Li-MSFT 795

Hi @Gerard Oneill

According to your description, there is currently no built-in feature in Exchange Online that can fully meet your needs. Regarding redirecting emails, it just presents the original email to another recipient completely. For modifying email headers, it cannot precisely remove certain content.

Best Regards,

Dezhi

Gerard Oneill 21 Reputation points

2023-06-09T15:07:47.76+00:00

Thanks for confirming this. With respect to "redirect", the various outlook help sites describe it as being different than forwarding (outlook allows you to choose between the two, whereas in exchange online you can "redirect" from the transport rules, and forward from the account's email preferences, but I suspect "redirect" was just a synonym for forwarding).

What would be the difference between the two? IMHO, a redirect rule (as described for outlook) would not include the forwarding addressee since that would be an obvious indicator that it was forwarded.

"Redirect" distinctions aside, is my "need" not an obvious one? Even if the difference between redirect and forwarding is much more subtle than what I'm thinking, a way to remove either a particular recipient seems obvious to me. The rules already allow removal of a header, and the MTA has already sent the mail to the other recipients. Restricting what the final destination knows about the other recipients seems obvious, and therefore removing the forwarding address should be an obvious application of that.

If there is no practical reason, could you add either one of these "issues" to a feature request? Or is there a way to add extra processing rules to Exchange Online?
Dezhi Li-MSFT 795 Reputation points

2023-06-16T10:05:24.8366667+00:00

Hi @Gerard Oneill

Redirection means that when a mailbox receives a mail, the mail will be redirected to other mailboxes, and the postage of the mail itself will not change, and neither the original recipient nor the original sender will be reminded. Forwarding means that the mailbox will resend another form of mail to other mailboxes after receiving the mail. Both the original recipient and the original sender will receive reminders. Regarding the mailbox header, we can delete the entire To header but we cannot delete only a certain mailbox in the To header.

Best Regards,

Dezhi
Winchester Pipes and Drums 0 Reputation points

2023-08-30T03:34:30.3333333+00:00

To put it a different way, even if we can't have specific modification control, there should be a way to have emails sent to ******@mydomain.org be forwarded to ******@groupdomain.org without ******@mydomain.org being included anywhere in the To/CC/BCC. Otherwise, reply-all will send to both the original address and the forwarded-to address which will result in the forwarded-to address receiving the email twice.

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Exchange Online redirect needed to remove original addressee from the To, but not other addressees.

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