Honoring the Reply-To header in email sync
We have a form on our website which is filled out by our website visitors requesting a price quote. This is our main method of collecting leads. Once the form is filled out, it's emailed to our sales email address which is used with the email sync feature of Pipedrive. We also create a deal in Pipedrive using the API.
The From: address on the email is currently set to the email address of the person that fills out the form. Whatever they enter into the email field is what we set as the From address on the email.
This however is really not the best way to keep email servers happy because if the person that fills out the form has an email address of somedude@yahoo.com for example, Gmail (and other servers) will just reject the email as SPAM. Why? Because the email is claiming to be from Yahoo's servers but it's not really coming from Yahoo's server, it's coming from our server where the customer filled out the web form.
To make the emails coming from our form more SPAM filter compliant and actually receive our mailbox and then on to Pipedrive via email sync feature, we have to change the FROM: address to an email address that lives on our web server such as webserver@ourserver.com. Then we set the REPLY-TO: header in the email to the email address of the person that filled out the form.
The problem is, now we receive the emails without them getting rejected by SPAM but when we try to reply within Pipedrive by hitting the reply button, the REPLY-TO address is ignored completely and the webserver@ourserver.com is filled into the TO: field. We then have to manually delete it and fill in the email address by hand to send any emails from Pipedrive which are replies to our quotes (so, all of them).
The purpose of the REPLY-TO: field is so that it's honored within email clients for these very reasons. The email address which the email came FROM is not always where a reply should go to, especially in this day and age with all the SPAM filters.
ALL email clients I have ever used, honor this REPLY-TO header but, Pipedrive does not and this is making using Pipedrive a real hassle for us. We love Pipedrive but having to manually remove and re-enter the email address for every email is causing us to reconsider other products to handle our leads.
The only alternative is to set the FROM address to the email address of the person filling out the form on our website, unfortunately, our email provider refuses all emails from Yahoo and some other domains because of the SPAM (SPF) settings set on those domains.
So, it's one annoyance or another at this point.
Any other work around I am missing? How are other users of Pipedrive dealing with this problem? Is it possible some users of Pipedrive are not even aware that they are missing these emails?
I only realized how many emails were getting blocked and leads were being lost when I started creating deals in Pipedrive using the API. I ended seeing a lot of deals being created but the email that gets sent would never show up.
In the past I would manually create deals from the emails, using email sync. Since I probably lost 20-30% of the lead emails due to this issue, the deals and leads were also lost. This was not a result of anything Pipedrive did wrong but that I didn't have the FROM address set to an email address on our server. Once I fixed that, all emails come through and no leads lost but now I have to manually remove and enter the email address every time I send from Pipedrive.
Thanks for reading all this and I appreciate any advice you can provide while I wait and hope that Pipedrive will update the email sync client to honor the REPLY-TO header.
Comments
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Perhaps I'm thinking way too simple so apologies if my suggestion doesn't help, but have you tried to use Pipedrive's build in web forms.
You can easily embed these in your website, from there you can automatically create leads and contacts in Pipedrive and then even set up workflow automations based on new incoming data where you can automatically email the people filling in the web forms with certain templated personalized emails.0 -
Just had this issue too. We don’t want to use Pipedrive-specific solutions because we also use the address for support with email going to our support service. Google Mail and Helpscout both recognise the Reply To header, so would be great if Pipedrive could too!
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Test Candidates said:
Just had this issue too. We don’t want to use Pipedrive-specific solutions because we also use the address for support with email going to our support service. Google Mail and Helpscout both recognise the Reply To header, so would be great if Pipedrive could too!
Thanks @Test Candidates passing this on to the team!
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This is a well known problem since years, i left pipedrive mostly because of this and sadly faced that is still an issue. Why a basic feature has not yet implemented ?
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Really need this feature too. It seems to be just one line of code fix. And this is the way E-mails should act.
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Mike van der Valk said:
Perhaps I'm thinking way too simple so apologies if my suggestion doesn't help, but have you tried to use Pipedrive's build in web forms.
You can easily embed these in your website, from there you can automatically create leads and contacts in Pipedrive and then even set up workflow automations based on new incoming data where you can automatically email the people filling in the web forms with certain templated personalized emails.Yeah that's not a solution because the features of built in web forms with Pipedrive are far too limiting for our needs. Thanks though
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Test Candidates said:
Just had this issue too. We don’t want to use Pipedrive-specific solutions because we also use the address for support with email going to our support service. Google Mail and Helpscout both recognise the Reply To header, so would be great if Pipedrive could too!
Anything new on this? It's been 8 months. Thanks.
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Anything new on this? It's been 8 months and we really need to solve this or go somewhere else which will be a huge hassle but, THIS is a daily hassle with EVERY lead, EVERY time we want to reply to them.
At this point we have the FROM address set to what is typed in the web form so we can actually reply to them without having to delete and re-enter the email address manually when we reply. This also means that many of the emails never make it to our Gmail account or to Pipedrive because they are rejected as SPAM. This is a HUGE hassle and really a basic way that email clients are supposed to work. I personally consider this a BUG in Pipedrive, not a feature request. Pipedrive is acting as an email client and should honor a very standard email header Reply-To. Just my opinion but I really think this issue should take some priority over other things because it is actually a bug in my opinion. Thanks for expediting a fix for this. I think the only reason you don't get more people complaining about this is because they don't even know it's happening since they are just not ever seeing the emails due to SPAM filters and the way this all works. They are not complaining about emails missed with valuable leads for their business because they never see them. It's like complaining about the phone calls you aren't getting (you never know because you didn't get them) LOL. It's a little easier to think of this like the way caller-id works these days. It's very short sided to assume that someone wishes to have their call returned to the caller-id they called from when in fact they may be calling form a large company with a single caller-id for every outbound call. In most cases if it's a personal call and they are calling from work, they want to be called back on their cell phone number which is NOT the caller-id. The email world has figured this out by using the Reply-To header, it just needs to be used and honored. Thanks for reading all this and appreciate any fix that can be expedited by Pipedrive.
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Todd Routhier said:
Anything new on this? It's been 8 months and we really need to solve this or go somewhere else which will be a huge hassle but, THIS is a daily hassle with EVERY lead, EVERY time we want to reply to them.
At this point we have the FROM address set to what is typed in the web form so we can actually reply to them without having to delete and re-enter the email address manually when we reply. This also means that many of the emails never make it to our Gmail account or to Pipedrive because they are rejected as SPAM. This is a HUGE hassle and really a basic way that email clients are supposed to work. I personally consider this a BUG in Pipedrive, not a feature request. Pipedrive is acting as an email client and should honor a very standard email header Reply-To. Just my opinion but I really think this issue should take some priority over other things because it is actually a bug in my opinion. Thanks for expediting a fix for this. I think the only reason you don't get more people complaining about this is because they don't even know it's happening since they are just not ever seeing the emails due to SPAM filters and the way this all works. They are not complaining about emails missed with valuable leads for their business because they never see them. It's like complaining about the phone calls you aren't getting (you never know because you didn't get them) LOL. It's a little easier to think of this like the way caller-id works these days. It's very short sided to assume that someone wishes to have their call returned to the caller-id they called from when in fact they may be calling form a large company with a single caller-id for every outbound call. In most cases if it's a personal call and they are calling from work, they want to be called back on their cell phone number which is NOT the caller-id. The email world has figured this out by using the Reply-To header, it just needs to be used and honored. Thanks for reading all this and appreciate any fix that can be expedited by Pipedrive.
Hello Todd,
I believe I have a workaround worth mentioning, but it would require a 3rd party tool called Zapier.
Zapier has a feature called Email Parser by Zapier.
What this does is read the content of your email and extract the info you need. Then using Zapier, you can insert the extracted info in Pipedrive.
This would mean that you would be able to get all the info from the web form into Pipedrive without really having to sync those emails at all.
There is a video showing you how Email Parser by Zapier works under the second link. If you have any other doubts, please reach out to our support team.
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Todd Routhier said:
Anything new on this? It's been 8 months and we really need to solve this or go somewhere else which will be a huge hassle but, THIS is a daily hassle with EVERY lead, EVERY time we want to reply to them.
At this point we have the FROM address set to what is typed in the web form so we can actually reply to them without having to delete and re-enter the email address manually when we reply. This also means that many of the emails never make it to our Gmail account or to Pipedrive because they are rejected as SPAM. This is a HUGE hassle and really a basic way that email clients are supposed to work. I personally consider this a BUG in Pipedrive, not a feature request. Pipedrive is acting as an email client and should honor a very standard email header Reply-To. Just my opinion but I really think this issue should take some priority over other things because it is actually a bug in my opinion. Thanks for expediting a fix for this. I think the only reason you don't get more people complaining about this is because they don't even know it's happening since they are just not ever seeing the emails due to SPAM filters and the way this all works. They are not complaining about emails missed with valuable leads for their business because they never see them. It's like complaining about the phone calls you aren't getting (you never know because you didn't get them) LOL. It's a little easier to think of this like the way caller-id works these days. It's very short sided to assume that someone wishes to have their call returned to the caller-id they called from when in fact they may be calling form a large company with a single caller-id for every outbound call. In most cases if it's a personal call and they are calling from work, they want to be called back on their cell phone number which is NOT the caller-id. The email world has figured this out by using the Reply-To header, it just needs to be used and honored. Thanks for reading all this and appreciate any fix that can be expedited by Pipedrive.
Hello Support Team,
The problem is not that I can't get the info form my form into Pipedrive, I do that fine using your API directly without the need for something like Zapier.
The problem is that I need and use the email sync feature because I need the emails from our system to be part of the lead/deal. I need to reply to the email which is sent from our form and synced using the email sync feature. When I hit reply, the Pipedrive SHOULD use the reply-to header as the To address like all other email clients and applications that use/sync email and NOT the From address. There is a reason why the reply-to header exist and shouldn't be ignored.
This is a problem for myself and from the looks of the replies to my post, your other customers as well. Based on the lack of action on Pipedrive's part regarding this issue, I am guessing this will never be resolved. I will be looking for a different solution to handle my leads or go back to my own solution.
Sad really, this is a serious issue for me and a number of your other customers and I hate to leave Pipedrive but, it's a big deal. Pipedrive is a great product but, for me, this is a deal breaker.
This is and has been a bug in your product as far as I am concerned. If you promote and sell the ability to sync email, you should honor a pretty standard header. In my opinion of course.
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We have the same issue.
Using the 'reply-to' (or adding some kind of lead ID tag to the email or any other suggestion) would be ideal.
In response to why the workarounds don't offer a solution...
#1 Using the pipedrive webform builder
Our webforms are highly customised visually, make api calls on submission as well as submitting emails to staff, service providers and our customers.
#2 Setting the 'From' to the customer email
Same as mentioned elsewhere, we notice a big drop in deliverability if we pretend to send from the customer email
#3 Using the API / Zapier to send
We're already doing this for some forms via the API on submission, but as Todd Routhier says, it's just a note on a lead, not the same as an email thread connected to the lead. The two bits of information are still too separate
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