Suggest Totara Learn features

Proposed change to automated email "From" address

TL-7034 Give Site Admin the ability to edit and delete Program/Certification completion records
TL-6478 - Fall back to site homepage instead of error when user has no dashboards

Welcome to this forum!

Following a couple of forum posts regarding the behaviour of email reply addresses in Face-to-face:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17752

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17537

Since the current behaviour is clearly causing some issues we have been considering the way we handle the "From" address in automated messages within Totara and if we can solve these problems.

Currently most messages are sent from the user that initialised the action - so for example if you comment on someone's learning plan they would get a message with your address as the "From" address.

Since this seems to be causing emails to get caught in spam filters, we are considering changing this behaviour in all Totara messages to use the system wide "noreply" address as the "From" address instead. This can be configured by the system admin in Site administration ► Plugins ► Message outputs ►Email ► No reply address.

In the case of Face-to-face, where there is another setting in Site administration ► Plugin ► Activity modules ► Face-to-face ►Sender From we would send Face-to-face messages from that address if it was set, or from the no-Reply address otherwise.

In any cases where the only information about who initiated the action is the "From" address we would modify the email subject and/or content to describe who triggered the action - for example adding the line "User A commented on your Learning Plan" in the message body.

Because this is a significant change of behaviour we would wait for a major release before making the change (probably 2.6), but I just wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone is relying on the existing behaviour.

Let us know if this would help you, or be a big problem for you!

Simon

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I would definitely agree with this approach, and we will look forward to it being released in 2.6.

Dan

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The content of this forum post has been removed and can no longer be accessed.

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Unfortunately we didn't have time to make this change for 2.6, however we will make it a priority for 2.7.

Simon

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That's a shame, this is the first time I've seen this thread so, just to add my support we would find this feature extremely useful.

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Just wanted to mention, as I have before, that in order to get around the issue with "the same from & to" you can set the users email address to not be shown in the user's profile, and that has helped in some cases for trainers in sessions.

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Just for the community as a whole, here is what have found works best for the most consistent email deliverability.

The no-reply setting should use a domain that has SPF, Domain-keys, and a DMARC policy. This means, that for domain keys, the smtp server you are using must sign outgoing email with your domain key. This all can seem very overwhelming at first, but if you look at any email log where Google/gmail rejects email, it directs you to this exact information: DMARC (which included domain keys and SPF)

So with that foundation, I also then recommend the following:

NO setting in the "support contact" email address (since some functionalities seem to use it if its set and if its different than the no-reply setting in email message outputs
The main/default site admin should have setting enabled in user profile to "hide email address from everyone"
The "always send email from no-reply" in Email message outputs setting should be enabled (I think introduced in 27)
If using forums, configure forums plugin settings to not user user's email address
if using F2F, as per discussion in this thread, use valid no-reply that has DMARC all set up for the domain

This whole problem stems from Totara trying to send email FROM users' email address (as previously mentioned). In most use-cases, this is not going to work at all. One caveat to this could be a corporate setting, where all users share the same email domain, and the company's email servers whitelist the LMS IP address.

I've experienced some situations where a site is just configured with authenticated smtp and a gmail account in Email message outputs... this actually has really good delivery outcomes, because the FROM (the sender email address) is always over-ridden with the gmail account's email address. The problem here though is Google's/Gmail's limits on number of email that can be sent this way. So this is only a solution for small-ish use cases.

I hope this helps others. The whole thing with DMARC, SPF, and Domain Keys is not for the faint of heart, and is best left to email server experts, system administrators, and network specialists, IMHO. Implementing DMARC can actually break your email company wide if not done properly, if your LMS shares the same domain as the noreply email setting domain.

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If "always send email from no-reply" is enabled, the F2F notification still seems to come from the address of the person who signed up the person.

Is this normal behavior? (2.7.3)

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Hi Csaba

There is a setting for face to face no reply as well - and according to the description above would override the No reply address . If you leave the face to face No-reply blank then the no reply address would be used.

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Hi Craig,

I cannot get this working.

- I have a facetoface_fromaddress set, emailonlyfromnoreplyaddress is set to Yes (See screenshots)

- Trying it with a test user, by signing up to a sesson he gets the email still from the person who signs him up, so in case it's the admin than from the admin, in case the testuser signs up himself then he gets the mail from itself.

What am i doing wrong?

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Hi Csaba

The Sender address for the face to face should not have anything in it

With this setting the address in the No-reply address (Plugins > Message outputs > Email) will be used in face to face emails if you select Always send email from the no-reply address.

regards

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Hi Craig,

thanks but how do I do it?

Empty seems like not to be an option for this field.

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Hi Craig,

any updates on this?

Thanks
Csaba

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Hi Csaba

Sorry for missing your post - you are right the F2F doesn't allow you to add an empty email address under the sender address like the no reply setting does.

In this case you need to include a valid no-reply email that has DMARC setup as outlined by Jamie above so the smtp mail server uses your domain key. The default one totara@example.com doesn't work this way, Jamie may be able to elaborate on how to set the DMARC policy as I am unsure on how to do this.

Craig

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