Exchange 2010 forwarding rule stripping address

exchange-2010

Original Question

We just migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. We have a single mailbox that accepts emails from customers and then forwards them using server-side rules. When a message is forwarded, the sender's email address is being stripped. This does NOT happen when we manually forward the message from within an Outlook client.

Examples of the From: line are shown below for clarity.

Auto-forward rule:

From: Joe Person

Manually forwarding within Outlook:

From: Joe Person [mailto:joeperson@mail.tld]

Does anyone know what changed in 2010 (2007?), and how to circumvent this so that we can see the email address of the original sender?

UPDATE

As Holocryptic pointed out in the comments, this is a similar issue to the one noted in this question: Exchange 2010 Out of office doesn't show original senders email address — Ben's situation was slightly different however, since it was dealing specifically with Out of Office replies/forwards. The options for message handling are missing in mailbox rules.

Some things I've tried, however, have come up with some interesting results:

  • This behavior happens even when an entire account is set to autoforward at the mailbox level from AD or Exchange Management Console
  • The only current workaround seems to be forwarding as an attachment.
  • A Journal account in Exchange 2010 will receive all messages as attachments now, instead of in a forwarded manner like before. Perhaps this indicates that the behavior is working as intended?

Since forwarding the message as an attachment is exactly what we wanted to avoid, it seems I will have to leave this question open for now. If anyone else has found a better workaround, I'm ALL ears.

Best Answer

I know you said that you changed the rules to be redirect instead of forward and it didn't resolve the issue; however, redirect is the correct action if you want to preserve the original sender.

What you might want to try is making the redirect change and implementing as transport rules on your hub or edge transports. In fact if you implement on either the hub or edge and it doesn't help you might want to try implementing on the other. Sometimes you will see different behavior depending on whether the transport rule is implemented on the hub or edge transport.