How Catchemail mailbox addresses are identified

Owned by Andy Brook [Plugin People]
Jun 13, 2023
2 min read

since JEMH 4.1.13

Summary

This page explains the source and order of email data used to identify ‘the’ inbound mailbox address for the processing of an email.

About Catchemail Mailbox addresses

Mailbox addresses are the addressee that end users send mail to, eg jira@yourco.com. Mailbox addresses are optional but recommended so that they never end up in email-user text custom fields. ALL mailbox addresses are excluded from addressee processing, regardless of whether a User has that address (no User should ever have a mailbox address, it causes mail loops).

Profile level Catchemail Addresses and Regexps

Mailbox addresses have historically been defined in Profile > Email > Catch Email Adddress, can be simple text addresses (jira@yourco.com) or a regular expression (.*-jira@yourco.com). Care must always be taken with wildcards, eg .*@yourco.com would match on ALL addresses in the @yourco.com domain, meaning ALL users would be excluded from addressee processing.

Mail Headers

Mail Headers like ‘Delivered-To’ can sometimes have the original addressee the mail was sent to (eg mail was sent BCC). JEMH allows you to nominate these headersProfile > Email > Catch Email Headers. Note: do not store standard headers (To,Cc,Bcc here), Catch Email Headers are not the same, are expected to hold only an email address of form user@domain.com (no personal part).

Addressee expansion

JEMH can where configued take addressees discovered through standard headers (To, Cc, Bcc) and use LDAP to expand ‘distribution group’ addresses to the constituent members. This enables JEMH to resolve the actual mailbox addressee involved, and exclude, breaking one source of mail loop.

Search sequence

  1. Mail Headers (eg Delivered-To)

  2. Recipients, added sequentially as discovered through (To, Cc, Bcc*).

  3. Distribution List Recipients (expanded through LDAP)

* Bcc is never actually populated in ‘real life’ however, JEMH can populate this header during a pre-processing task.

Project Mapping Domain Rule : Addressees

Historically JEMH required all Mailbox addresses to be defined through Profile > Email > Catch Email Address, even if there were 1000 Domain Rules with addressee matches. This was addressed in JEMH 4.1.12, where we now resolve Catch Email Addresses through Addressee Domain Rules as well.

Advisories about duplicate Profile > Email > Catch Email Address

Where an Addressee Domain Rule is found to match a standard Profile > Email > Catch Email Address, an advisory is added indicating that the Profile > Email > Catch Email Address could be redundant - its always possible that the Profile > Email > Catch Email Address value is more general in scope (eg .*-jira@domain.com) and the addressee expression is more specific (eg sales-jira@domain.com). Removal of Profile > Email > Catch Email Address should be considered on a case by case basis!