Yesterday's experience made it clear that we should migrate email for the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens from TransACT to gmail as soon as possible. The first step, of course, is to forward the messages from TransACT until we can wean people from sending them there in the first placea problem not made any simpler by the fact that messages continue to be sent from that address without a Reply-To: header.
But how? I couldn't find anything. So I tried calling TransACT technical support at 13 30 61. Optus regrets that the number you have dialled has been disconnected . Repeatedly. So I finally found the normal, non-toll-free number in Canberra, 02 6229 8000 (thank God for VoIP!). Called them, explained to the receptionist that there was a problem with getting through on the toll-free number. Never mind, I can connect you . No indication that she thought that that was a problem for TransACT. It's probably just a problem with the phone company . No recognition that it might be a problem for TransACT. She promised to report it and put me in a wait loop that took forever. After 20 minutes somebody answered and told me that they had clearly made a mistake, the technician should have been on site yesterday. Clearly not my case, and he put me back in the wait loop. Another 10 minutes and I was connected to Tahlia, who was reluctant to spell her name, and who told me I had come in on the wrong number, and that I should have called the Victorian number. I was about to complain that it was the only number I could get, but she did connect me, to Ruby, after a total of about 45 minutes.
I first asked Ruby how to set up SquirrelMail to not strip the headers off a message when forwarding. She didn't understand. Where did you get SquirrelMail from? . She thought that it was something installed on my machine. It seems that they don't call it by its name, just Webmail . When I finally explained it to her, she didn't know what a header was. The standard SMTP headers . Where is this on your screen? . You understand SMTP, right? . Yes, I've heard of it . So I asked to be connected to somebody who understood the question, and she told me she would get somebody to call me back.
Finally Sean called back and first wanted me to give him access to the mail account before he could tell me anything. He appeared to be asking for passwords over the phone. How do I know who he is? Not very encouraging from a technical support manager. But he finally confirmed that no, there's no way that you can configure SquirrelMail to keep the headers when forwarding messages. Indeed, he has been a technical support manager for some years now, and he doesn't know of any program that keeps the headers when forwarding. And I didn't know any other that strips them.
In any case, he was more help with my second question. I could configure SquirrelMail to automatically forward to another address. I asked him to step me though the necessary mouse clicks, and once again he wanted to get into my account to do so. In the end, it proved that I couldn't do it from my interface, but that he could, something that Raoul Dixon later confirmed. And yes, it worked. And didn't store the message in the local inbox any more. That's a little faster a transition than I had planned, but I suppose it will work.
Later I checked: yes, it seems that most Microsoft space MUAs strip headers when forwarding messages. I had never noticed before.