Attempt to prevent bounced emails by setting default envelope sender not working

Hi there,

I have been trying to fix the DMARC issues that I’m running into by setting the default envelope sender, which I believed would set the From address to the one set in the config and would therefore not be detected as an email sent by an unauthenticated server.

The editor of our journal has a Yahoo address, so whenever he sends article review requests they get blocked.

Therefore I have set the default_envelope_sender to an email address from my domain and set force_default_envelope_sender to be on which I thought would replace his Yahoo email address with the one set in the config. Am I wrong in making this assumption?

This is the bounce error:
host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.195.26]
said: 550-5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from yahoo.com is not accepted due to
domain’s 550-5.7.1 DMARC policy. Please contact the administrator of
yahoo.com domain if 550-5.7.1 this was a legitimate mail.

I am using OJS 3.1.1.0

Any help would be highly appreciated.
Best regards

Hi @manue1,

Have you added dmarc record into the dns zone?

Hi @sisca_ojs,

yes I have added a DMARC DNS record and this didn’t resolve my issue.

The reason being is that the emails are still sent by the user’s email address instead of the default envelope sender. That email address is a @yahoo.com address and therefore it is still detected as unauthenticated.

My doubt is still if setting the default_envelope_sender actually works and if it is supposed to do what I think it should - send all emails from OJS with the “From” address set to this email address with the users’ email set as the ‘Return to’ address.

The intent for Add reply-tos back in for DMARC compatibilty · Issue #1723 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub is to restore the functionality you describe in OJS 2.x (sending emails with the From address of the forced default_envelope_sender with the Reply To address of the application user). This is, however, not merged into OJS 2.x.

I see the code in the 3.x line to use the default_envelope_sender and force_default_envelope_sender, but I don’t see any code to add a reply to.

It also seems possible to me that PHPMailer may still set the from to the original user, rather than the envelope sender:

Can you give a specific enable of the email domains you are using in the default_envelope_sender, the sender (which you have mentioned as @yahoo.com) and what the From and Return-Path headers in the email reflect?

Hi @manue1,

do you still have the issue?

Since upgrading OJS from 2.5.8.2 to 3.1.1-4 we are having the issues with e-mails not accepted from some journals of our hosting service https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/

I think the code additions from pkp/pkp-lib#4164 support generating DMARC compliant mails by tgc · Pull Request #4165 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub will fix this, and this has been already released with OJS 3.1.2.

We probably wont upgrade to 3.1.2. now as we just did a major upgrade to 3.1.1-4 and our own themes have to be adapted again for 3.1.2, so we probably hotfix this in.

Please tell me if you have made any progress with this problem.

Best regards,

Nils