Looking for a "noquote" denotion for emails, does this exist?

PHP
1

Been awhile since I posted here. :x

I wrote a basic contact form for our visitors, that on submit sends their message as an email to the appropriate personnel. The message template looks something like this:


Subject: $subject
Category: $category
Full Name: $fullName
Email Address: $emailAddress
IP Address: $ipAddress <?=strpos($ipAddress, $ourSubnet) !== false ? '(this message was sent from our property)' : ''?>

------------------------------

<?=$message?>

The IP Address bit is to inform our staff if an email is sent from someone on our subnet (which encompasses our business and residential network).

Now when a staff gets one of these emails, the “Reply-To” is set to the client’s email address logically. When they reply of course it will quote the original message. The problem is I don’t really want the IP Address bit to be quoted. It’s for our staff and not clients to see. Some clients might be the overly paranoid type who think we’re stalking them if they see we’re tracking their IP. (we make no mention of IP policies in our Privacy Statement, so there’s nothing they could fraud us on)

Is there a way to hide specific text to be quoted? It would be nice if there were a noquote tag, like:

<noquote>IP Address: $ipAddress <?=strpos($ipAddress, $ourSubnet) !== false ? '(this message was sent from our property)' : ''?></noquote>

Though that creates another problem, since I’m sending the emails as plain text and not HTML.

Obviously staff could just create a new email for replying to our clients or manually delete the IP bit, but I’m trying to streamline things.

Thoughts?

2

First thing that pops into my head (although a bit hacky and adds some overhead) is to send an html email with the ip address portion as an image that is stored on your server with an .htaccess file set to deny from all but your staff’s IP addresses.

3

Do you need the IP address in there? Why not simple indicate the email was sent on your subnet, but without the email address.

Origin: (External|Business|Residential)

4

Edit AS: “… but without the IP address”

5

Another thought (assuming you do need the ip address) is to put it in a comments header.

6

Do you know offhand if the comments in the comments header are shown visibly in email clients like Gmail, or Outlook? I want to make it simple for employees and not have to click through multiple things.

If not, I’ll probably put the IP in the comments header and do as others suggested – exclude the IP address. (The IP was more for external IPs, to gauge if the same person is spamming us or something)

Thanks!

7

If you want to track for spamming, why not store a unique id in the database for each email, along with the IP address. Then you can do a SELECT count(*) FROM email_ip GROUP BY ip_address
You could also use this unique ID in the email, to reference a specific email to the IP (or store the email in the db with the IP). Then just include the “from within our property” as needed.

8

It’s not that big of a deal, it was meant just as something for an employee to take note of. “Hey, I’ve seen that IP a few times and they keep slandering our business under different aliases. I will be cautious of emails from this IP.” line of thought. The script has a CAPTCHA to take care of significant spammers (i.e. bots).