The received email "To:" field does not contain the subscriber name

[lionep]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When a subscriber receive an email, in the mail headers, the To: header contains only the subscriber email, and not its name.

Describe the solution you'd like
The email can contain the header :
To: "Subscriber name" <[email protected]> instead of To: [email protected].

[knadh]

What is the advantage of including the recipient's name in the to field?

[cb3inco]

One could argue it makes it more 'personal' - I know mailchimp does what @lionep is asking for. Mailchimp suggests this is the reason to do it. But I'm not sure it's ever persuaded me more to open a newsletter because it used my first name.

[knadh]

Do mail clients even show this in the inbox list, unless you open an e-mail and look at the To field?

[jackdanielux]

They don't show this field anywhere except detail view of mail providers. Nowhere this would be visible so wondering how this prompts you to open more email? If personalization is the question that's in mail body and not in to field.

…

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[lionep]

Do mail clients even show this in the inbox list, unless you open an e-mail and look at the To field?

In Yahoo webmail, they show it, when you open the message :

From : Sender Name <[email protected]>
To : [email protected]

[knadh]

Your example shows From with a name. listmonk already does that. There does not seem to be any benefit to attaching the recipient's name to the recipient's address which only shows in the To field when the recipient opens the e-mail.

I just checked a bunch of non-personal e-mails in my mailbox and none of them have my name in the To field.

[cb3inco]

This is Mailchimps reasoning:

[knadh]

I did a feasibility check on this and it is a non-trivial change. Since this has no quantifiable benefits, we should drop this for now.

• The smtp lib does not support the syntax in the To address (error: mail: missing @ in addr-spec). This will require significant changes to the lib. Some context here.

• The feature will have to come with a toggle option in the admin to turn the behaviour on/off because not all mailing lists will have proper, publicly displayable names attached to subscribers.

[PaulVipond]

@knadh You beat me to it with your second point above. We get our subscriber lists from Mediavine who don't provide names. So when we import the records, we just give a default of '1' for the name. Therefore a toggle would be essential for us.

and can I just say while I'm here, what an awesome update 2.0.0 was. Such a cool and useful piece of software :-)

[lionep]

@knadh you’re right, I’ve analyzed my incoming emails, and only a small percentage of them have a personalized To: field, I thought it was a more standard way to proceed.

And of course, really nice project there!

[knadh]

Cheers everyone. Closing this issue for now. If the SMTP lib changes at some point to make this format feasible, we can add this option.

[melroy89]

It doesn't seemed solved. Is there any progress on this topic maybe?

[cb3inco]

@melroy89 it seems @knadh last comment indicated the status of the issue, but maybe things have changed and it could be implemented now?

[melroy89]

Yea so listmonk is using - smtp net package

I think you are able to change the "to" field which then, if available, include the name as well like so: To: Some Name <[email protected]>

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46369598/how-to-define-senders-name-in-golang-net-smtp-sendmail

[MaximilianKohler]

I also saw this was recommended to do to avoid spam filters. Is this doable with custom headers? Eg:

 [
     {
         "To": "{{ .Subscriber.Name }} <{{ .Subscriber.Email }}>"
     }
 ]

[jorgen-k]

Bumping this. Must be possible. When using smtp the to address is "half there" as in <[email protected]> including the brackets. So, a config option would be nice.

[melroy89]

I agree, this should just be possible. Please reopen issue.