Why are people receiving email from my site with ’on behalf of’ in the sender’s name?

If your content management or e-commerce system is sending emails automatically, it may be sending them through the web server.  This means that the true ‘return-path’ (where the emails come from) will be domain@webserver.extendcp.co.uk – where ‘domain’ will be your domain name and ‘webserver’ will be the web server ID your site is on.

This means that, no matter if you have a particular email address in the ‘From’ field, it will still say “on behalf of'.  Our server is sending the email on behalf of your email address, and, unfortunately, there is no way to override this if your system is using ‘localhost’ as the email network.

However, with many of the systems out there, you can use SMTP instead of localhost.  This then sends the message from an actual mailbox on the server and removes the 'on behalf of'.  Most content management and e-commerce systems have support for this, and you will typically only need the username and password of the mail box to set it up.

Also, since emails are now being sent from a 'real' mailbox, you will likely notice an increased delivery rate.