CLF for the Internet - E-Mail

Rationale

Auto-Acknowledgement:  Sample 1

Clients must be assured that their correspondence has been received and will be delivered to the appropriate place and that someone will respond to it. As a professional courtesy to GoC clients, an automatic electronic acknowledgement must be sent indicating that their correspondence has been received. The actual response to the e-mail will be prepared at the discretion of the institution.

From the client or citizen perspective, uncertainty can arise when sending an e-mail to a generic, or institutional or group mailbox, such as, for example, Department X@..., or Division Y@... or Webmaster@... These are used by some departments in the Contact Us or the Help section of the Web site. There is no individual contact, no person, no name to whom one might direct a query regarding the status of the question, comment or request. There can be a question raised in the client's mind - rightly or wrongly - "Will anyone in this nameless, faceless organization really pay attention to my message?" The automatic response in this case, at a minimum, indicates that the mail has been received and that someone will be attending to it. As mentioned, this is done as a courtesy and to inject a slightly "personal" touch into an automated procedure. It is these generic mailboxes to which the standard is addressed, and from which automatic responses must be generated.

In the case where an individual's e-mail address is used, there is no need to generate an automatic acknowledgement. Why?

From the client perspective, the situation is quite different. Here, there is a real person whom one can re-contact regarding any queries or status. If the client doesn't already have the telephone / fax number, it is easily obtainable by having the individual's name / organization, thereby opening other communications channels. If the e-mail, in fact, cannot be delivered for some technical reason, the system will so advise.   This situation is clearly much more service-oriented than is the generic case above. The client does not have same question arise when dealing with someone specific. The courtesy and the personal touch have already been applied. Someone "real" will be paying attention, and the client knows exactly who that is.

If the external address is a GoC site, with a gc.ca e-mail address, then the acknowledgement of receipt and the promise of action should take place. If it is not a gc.ca site, the handling of e-mail should be left to the external addressee to deal with as they see fit. We also want to make a clear distinction between generic or organizational mailboxes and personal ones.

4.4 Best Practices

If the individual is out of the office for an extended period, the Out of Office Auto-Reply should be used.

E-Mail loops best practices

1) Each corporate e-mail account will have two Internet addresses with one set-up as the default reply e-mail address. When a message is sent to the primary e-mail address (e.g. webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca), the auto-reply will be sent using the reply e-mail address (e.g. re-webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca). The reply e-mail address must have the auto-reply rule turned off. There is no possibility of a mail loop because any replies sent back to the corporate e-mail account will be addressed to the reply e-mail address (re-webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca) which does not have an auto-reply rule.

Example of Option 1:

-----Message d'origine-----
From: re-webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca
Date: March 1, 2001 2:43 PM
To: webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca
Subject: Looping address example

2) Another option is when a message is sent to a corporate e‑mail address (e.g. webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca), the auto-reply should incorporate a blank e‑mail in the "From" field. This will break the "Looping of auto-replies" because the system can't reply to the message because the "From" field is left blank.

Example of Option 2:

-----Message d'origine-----
From: THIS IS BLANK
Date: March 1, 2001 2:43 PM
To: webmaster@tbs-sct.gc.ca
Subject: Looping address example

About Option 2. Some mail systems refuse messages that do not have a valid addresses in the From field. The message would not be delivered and you wouldn't know it. They would never know you got their message.