Outlook ignoring Mail From Name on Internal Emails

Question

I am guessing that this is just the way Outlook is setup but I am curious if there is a workaround.

I am sending emails within a PHP application. My code works fine, but there is a slight snag.

If I use Amazon SES as the SMTP server, everything works as expected, but because of difficulties getting departments to simply click a link in the email to verify them as senders, we abandoned this route.

So we turned to Office365 SMTP where I can get the email admins to add the senders that I need without interdepartmental struggles, however, if the recipient of the email is another of our Office365 users (and they typically are), Outlook ignores my MAIL_FROM_NAME and just shows whatever is listed in the company directory attached to that mailbox. The MAIL_FROM_NAME is there in the email header and I can see it in Outlook when I view full header. It shows up fine when the email is sent to an external recipient, but for internal emails, I can't seem to customize the MAIL_FROM_NAME in a way that the casual recipient will see.

This is quite a problem as we sometimes need to specify a specific sender name using a shared mailbox email, but instead of it showing that sender's name, it shows the Department Name.

Is there anything I can do as the PHP app developer to tell Outlook to ignore the directory listing and show the MAIL_FROM_NAME that I set? Is there anything that the email admins can do on my service account to allow this without disturbing too much? Or am I stuck using an external SMTP server like Amazon SES and having to get departments to verify email addresses in their shared mailboxes just to run a higher risk of these emails ending up in the Junk Folder as they aren't coming from Office365?

Answer 1

I think you'd better modify the subject line according your needs.

Answer 2

I ended up going back to Amazon SES. I do not see why Microsoft would program Outlook to ignore the FROM name in the header on internal emails and just go with the directory FROM name, especially on shared mailboxes, nor do I understand why this is such a deal-breaker for the Communications department, but having to rely on a third-party SMTP for Office 365 emails does seem to show a blind-spot in Microsoft's customizability of their services.

Answer 3

Hi,

we are having the same problem when sending mails via Jira. For users that are logged in via the corresponing tenant, the configured from address is ignored and instead the name of the postbox user is shown as sender.

For external users that are not logged in via the same tenant, everything is working as expected.

Is there any option to disable this behaviour, so that the from address is shown in outlook for internal users also?

We allready set the mailbox to be hidden in the address book, without success.

Thanks and best regards,
Frank