Wingate Mail and BCC

[Passi]

Hi,

I have Wingate running on 1 PC and my Exchange server running on another. I use Wingate to download mail from an external mailbox which then forwards it to my exchange server. All goes well until there is an address in the BCC field of the message. Wingate does not recognize this address and these messages are forwarded to the postmaster immediately. We get alot of messages in this format, where there is no address in the to or cc field but only in the bcc field ( security industry, they dont want you to know who else received it ) and all these messages are delivered to the postmaster. Please help, since I have already purchased my license for Wingate!

Thanks

Administrator

[MattP]

Hi,

The problem with this is that BCC addresses are not contained in the email headers for obvious reasons. So when you receive mail to a catchall account all mail is delivered that matches that domain but the receiving server doesn't create a mail file for each recipient listed in the rcpt to field. It relies on the addresses being given in the email headers. When you then do a POP collection the mail is collected and then delivered to all recipients listed in the email headers. Obviously the BCC recipient is not listed, so the mail doesn't get delivered.

You must have the "if no addresses are recognised use the default address" checked do you? This will be receiving all the BCC emails as there won't be a recipient listed.

This is not really a WinGate mail problem. You can get around this by not using a catch-all account, because having individual email accounts will allow BCC mails to be delivered.

Regards,

Matt

[adrien]

Does the mail server that hosts the mail add any headers about who the mail was received for?

Sometimes that can be used to tell who the mail needs to be delivered to.

BCC can be a bit confusing - if you specify a BCC field in an email client when writing a message, that is used to deliver to the SMTP server, but the email address is not copied into the headers of the message itself. That then stops others from seeing that it had been blind CCed to the other recipients. So there is no BCC field in the actual message itself, and so WinGate can't look for addresses there.

Some mail servers however add a field like "X-Received-for" to allow other agents to see who the mail was originally sent to, since this needn't be in the message itself according to SMTP.

You may then need to sort these ones manually. If your mail server does that however, we can add the capability in WinGate to sort based on that field.

Adrien